Dr. Morgan Lorio
speaker
106 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 29 Jan
Dr. Morgan Lorio’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Thank you for having me, Carly.
I'm Morgan Lurio.
I'm an orthopedic spine and hand surgeon.
I've been working for decades now with ISAS, chairing their coding and reimbursement task force, and very much involved with what's happening in policy nationally.
Well, this piece was written out of necessity, not theory.
In other words, I felt compelled to break a silence that policy has enforced for years.
I should also say this clearly at the outset that this article, which is now in press at the International Journal of Spine Surgery, was authored in part as a direct response to the Senate Health Committee's current request for input on AMA CPT codes.
I felt it was important that this analysis exist in the public record while those discussions are actively underway now.
Over the last 20 years, spine surgeries experienced a quiet but relentless devaluation of physician work, and the data now make that undeniable.
Add the pandemic as an accelerant, and what we're seeing isn't cyclical pressure, it's structural transformation.
I wrote this as a surgeon, not as an economist, someone who lived through COVID, nearly died from it, and woke up to a profession that no longer resembled the one I entered.
Certainly.
Well, the short answer is budget neutrality without reality testing.
When CMS insists that the pie is fixed, any upward adjustment must be offset elsewhere, often from procedural medicine.
Budget neutrality doesn't control cost.
It just decides who absorbs them.
Surgeons, unfortunately, are the scapegoats.
There's been no meaningful cost-of-living adjustment since 2001, while practice costs have risen more than 60%.
What's framed as efficiency is, in practice, systematic attrition.
What's being sold as efficiency, cost savings, streamlining, optimization, modernization, has the real effect of gradually eliminating people, capacity and function, rather than genuinely improving performance.
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