Members of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission met last week in Washington, D.C. Among the issues they discussed during their two days of meetings were Medicare coverage policy, Medicare coverage of telehealth services, pharmacy benefit managers and specialty pharmacies, and physician supervision requirements in critical access and small rural hospitals. Go here to see the issue briefs and presentations that were discussed during the meeting.
The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has written to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to convey its views on CMS’s proposed revisions to Medicare physician payment policies for 2018. Among the issues MedPAC addresses in its comment letter are proposed payments to physicians for nonexcepted items and services provided in nonexcepted off-campus provider-based hospital departments, the Medicare shared savings program, and the Medicare diabetes prevention program. See CMS’s comment letter here.
The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has weighed in with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on its proposed regulation governing the 2018 hospital outpatient prospective payment system and ambulatory surgical center payment systems and quality reporting programs. Among the issues MedPAC addresses in its comment letter to CMS are the proposal to reduce Medicare reimbursement for 340B-covered prescription drugs; how to reinvest the savings such a payment cut would produce; the ability of hospitals to expand the services they offer at hospital-based outpatient departments; proposed changes in the Medicare hospital outpatient quality reporting program and ambulatory surgery center quality [...]
Medicare should adopt a unified system for post-acute-care payments even earlier than its target date of 2024. Or so the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission told Congress. MedPAC’s idea? Implement such a system by 2021 and phase it in over a three-year transition period, the agency said in its annual report and recommendations to Congress Learn more about what MedPAC recommended and why it recommended it in this McKnight’s Long-Term Care News article. Find MedPAC’s annual report to Congress here.
The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has issued its annual report and recommendations to Congress. The major issues addressed in the report include: implementing a unified payment system for post-acute care reforming Medicare payment for drugs under Part B redesigning the merit-based incentive payment system (MIPS) and strengthening advanced alternative payment models using premium support for Medicare the relationship between clinician services and other Medicare services payments from drug and device manufacturers to physicians and teaching hospitals in 2015 the medical device industry stand-alone emergency departments hospital and skilled nursing facility use by Medicare beneficiaries who reside in nursing facilities the [...]
Last week Mark Miller, executive director of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, testified before the House Ways and Means Committee’s Health Subcommittee. In his testimony, Miller summarized and explained some of the key points MedPAC made in its March report to Congress, including: why MedPAC believes most post-acute-care payments are too high; why Medicare needs to reduce the incentives for hospitals and doctors to deliver more services; why it recommended no FY 2018 payment increases for long-term acute-care hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers, and skilled nursing facilities and reductions of payments for home health care providers and inpatient rehabilitation facilities; why [...]
Medicare should implement a unified, site-neutral payment system for post-acute care as soon as 2021, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has decided. Current efforts to develop and implement such a system should be accelerated, Congress’s advisors on Medicare payment issues decided. While MedPAC’s recommendations are not binding, they are highly respected by Congress and federal regulators and often find their way into new public policy. MedPAC will present its latest recommendations to Congress in June. For more information about MedPAC’s position on post-acute-care payments, see this article in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News.
The Medicare Payment Advisory Committee met last week in Washington, D.C. On the MedPAC agenda were the following issues: Part B drug payment policy issues using premium support in Medicare implementing a unified payment system for post-acute care an overview of the medical device industry regional variation in Medicare Part A, Part B, and Part D spending and service use measuring low-value care in Medicare payment and plan incentives in Part D the role of Medicare policy in provider consolidation Find the issue briefs and presentations that supported MedPAC commissioners’ discussion of these issues here and find a transcript of [...]
The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has submitted its annual Medicare payment rate recommendations to Congress. The recommendations, required by law, include: rate increases as required by current law for hospital inpatient payments, hospital outpatient payments, physicians, other health professional services, and outpatient dialysis payments; no updates for ambulatory surgical centers, skilled nursing facilities, long-term-care hospitals, and hospices; and five percent rate reductions for home health agencies and inpatient rehabilitation facilities. MedPAC continued its past practice of recommending reform of the manner in which Medicare pays for post-acute-care services, maintaining that the unified payment system it has proposed would save $30 [...]
At their public meeting last week, members of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission discussed two important issues involving how Medicare pays for post-acute-care services. First, MedPAC members suggested that implementation of a new, unified, site-neutral payment system for post-acute care, mandated by the 2014 Improving Medicare Post-Acute Care Transformation Act (IMPACT), could be completed well before the legislation’s target date of 2024. Commissioners discussed the possibility of Medicare introducing such a new system, perhaps by phasing it in over a period of years, beginning in 2021. MedPAC commissioners also discussed recommending to Congress that it reduce Medicare payments for post-acute-care [...]