Bulletin Board
Bulletin Board
MACPAC Meets
The Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission met for two days last week in Washington, D.C. The following is MACPAC’s own summary of the sessions. The October 2018 MACPAC meeting covered a range of front-line issues in Medicaid, leading off with an analysis of disproportionate share hospital (DSH) allotments on Thursday morning. Following the analysis, the Commission discussed options for March recommendations on how to structure DSH allotment reductions that are scheduled to begin in fiscal year 2020. The Commission later resumed the discussion it began in September on [...]
APM Use Rising
Alternative payment models now account for more than one-third of health care payments, according to a new analysis. Leading the way is Medicare Advantage plans, which expend nearly half of their Medicare payments through APMs. Learn more about this trend in health care delivery and payments in the report “APM Measurement: Progress of Alternative Payment Models,” which was prepared by the Health Care Payment Learning & Action Network and can be found here.
House Members Protest Site-Neutral Payment Proposal
138 members of the House of Representatives have written to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Seema Verma to protest CMS’s proposal to extend Medicare outpatient site-neutral payment policies to off-campus, provider-based outpatient departments specifically exempted from such policies by Congress under the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015. In questioning CMS’s rationale for the proposed policy, the House members wrote that It is unclear how CMS has deemed all of the OPD [outpatient department] services at the grandfathered off-campus HOPDs [hospital outpatient departments] as cause of an unnecessary increase [...]
Medicaid Expansion Didn’t Hurt Access After All
The expansion of Medicaid in nearly two-thirds of the states has not affected access to care for Medicare participants in those states. According to a new analysis by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Medicare patients had no more trouble getting timely doctors’ appointments, suffered no increase in costs, and experienced no increase in waiting times after their state expanded its Medicaid program under the Affordable Care Act. Learn more about these findings in this Healthcare Dive report or go here for access to the National Bureau of Economic Research [...]
New Report Looks at Medicaid Buy-In
While there has been a great deal of public discussion of late about “Medicare for all,” less attention has been paid to the concept of permitting people to buy into their state’s Medicaid program. Now, the Rockefeller Institute of Government has published a new report that presents the different approaches to the concept of Medicaid buy-in. It also seeks to address six major questions of potential Medicaid buy-in efforts: How large is the intended population of new enrollees? What kind of coverage would be offered? How would enrollment be financed? [...]