Medicare's Unpaid List Runs 208,661 Rows and Closes October 13
CMS published a correction this morning whose entire content is a hyperlink it forgot to print in August. The address leads to a spreadsheet naming 192,556 clinicians Medicare owes an APM incentive payment and cannot pay, and the claim deadline is eight days out. We matched the list against CMS's own CY2024 payment file: the money on the table models to between $187 million and $239 million, and oncology holds twelve percent of it on two percent of the names.
The whole of the correction CMS published this morning is one sentence of self-description:
"On page 52305, we inadvertently did not provide a hyperlink corresponding to the web address where relevant QPs who anticipated receiving an APM Inventive Payment but have not received a payment, may provide CMS with updated Medicare billing information."
The misspelling is CMS's. So is the rest of it.
The advisory being corrected ran at 91 FR 52305 on August 13. Clinicians who hit qualifying APM participant status in the 2024 performance period earned a 1.88 percent incentive payment for 2026, CMS could not match a TIN to some of them, and those clinicians, verbatim, "should follow the instructions to provide CMS with updated Medicare billing information at the following web address: 2026 QP Notice for APM Incentive Payment."
That last phrase is where the address was supposed to go. In the Federal Register it ran as plain text, nothing to type into a browser.
The deadline in that same notice is October 13, after which "any claim to an APM incentive payment for the 2026 payment period ... will be forfeited."
The window is 61 days long. The address of record appeared on day 53.
What the Address Turned Out to Be
Not a cms.gov page. The correction instructs the printer to insert this:
https://d2g5m5leph8kam.cloudfront.net/s3fs/s3fs-public/2026-08/2026-qp-notice-for-apm-incentive-payment.zip?VersionId=EfxfCWv.NH0e9Nd59vkJe6AGs8qa8bsK
A CloudFront object URL carrying an S3 version token, printed in the Federal Register as the official place to collect money Medicare owes you.
We pulled it: 6,705,775 bytes, two files. A four-page instruction letter and a spreadsheet, PY26 Public Notice File_08_25_26.xlsx.
The letter is the part worth sitting with. It tells you to "locate your name in the Excel spreadsheet available at: 2026 QP Notice for APM Incentive Payment."
Same dead phrase, no address.
The AHA wrote this up on August 12, ACDIS on August 20. Both linked to the Federal Register notice, the only thing there was to link to.
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