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 procedures that can be performed in such facilities so they can compete with hospitals for outpatient services.
The proposed regulation also calls for reducing quality reporting requirements and giving providers financial incentives to prescribe non-opioid pain medicine for surgery patients.
The regulation, which would affect provider payments beginning on January 1, 2019, was published in proposed form and will be finalized later in the year. Stakeholders have until September 24 to submit comments to CMS. For further information about what CMS has proposed, see this CMS fact sheet outlining the proposed regulation and the 761-page proposed regulation itself.