Bulletin Board
Bulletin Board
New Reg Pushes Medicare Toward Site-Neutral Outpatient Payments
Medicare would make more payments for outpatient services on a site-neutral basis under a newly proposed regulation just released by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The 2019 Medicare outpatient prospective payment system regulation, published in proposal form, calls for: paying physician fee schedule rates rather than hospital outpatient rates at excepted off-campus provider-based departments; slashing payments for office visits; extending this year’s 340B prescription drug discount payments, already cut nearly 30 percent this year, to additional providers; and raising ambulatory surgical center rates and expanding the list of [...]
Proposal Would Equalize Medicare Physician Payments
All physicians would be paid equally for Medicare-covered office visits under a new proposal published recently by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Under the proposed regulation, Medicare would collapse four levels of patient evaluation and management office visits, eliminate the extensive documentation required to justify the payments physicians seek, and pay one simple rate for office visits. CMS estimates that reducing the documentation requirements would save every doctor 51 hours a year. Some critics are concerned that specialists and those caring for especially ill or especially complex patients [...]
Pay Raise Didn’t Lead More Docs to Participate in Medicaid
The temporary rate increase that the Affordable Care Act provided as means of encouraging more doctors to serve Medicaid patients did not work, according to two new studies published in the journal Health Affairs. According to the studies, the increase in the number of physicians who decided to begin serving Medicaid patients as a result of the fee increase was negligible. Among the reasons the studies’ authors offer for the lack of growth in the participation of doctors are the limited nature of the pay raise and the documentation required [...]
CMS: Not Done With Medicaid Work Requirements
Despite the ruling of a federal court that Kentucky’s new Medicaid work requirement violates federal law, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has not ruled out approving future requests from state governments to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. Or so asserted CMS administrator Seema Verma at a recent health care event in Washington, D.C. The Washington Examiner reports that at that event, Verma said that We are looking at what the court said. We want to be respectful of the court’s decision while trying to push ahead with [...]
CMS Proposes Changes in Medicare Physician Payments
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has published a proposed regulation that it says …proposed historic changes that would increase the amount of time that doctors and other clinicians can spend with their patients by reducing the burden of paperwork that clinicians face when billing Medicare. The proposed rules would fundamentally improve the nation’s healthcare system and help restore the doctor-patient relationship by empowering clinicians to use their electronic health records (EHRs) to document clinically meaningful information instead of information that is only for billing purposes. Among the policy [...]