Alternative Payment Model – The Health Care Blog

Congress Is Getting the Transition to Alternative Payment Models Wrong

Sep 23, 2020

By TAYLOR CHRISTENSEN

Alternative payment models (APMs) are a hot topic these days, and everyone seems to agree that we need to transition toward them and away from fee for service (FFS). But how should we do it?

First, let’s think about this task as government policy makers would think about it.

They would probably start by saying, “We need to find a way to give incentives to providers and payers to try out these different APMs.” This would be fairly easy to do through Medicare, so they would create some Medicare APM programs and structure them in a way that makes the benefits of joining large enough that lots of providers will want to participate.

And for the sake of uniform provider incentives, they would also want to encourage private insurer-provider diads to start using APMs, preferably ones as similar to the Medicare APM programs as possible. And so they would probably have to offer private insurers and/or providers money to do so.

What Might We Expect in the MACRA Proposed Rule?

Apr 6, 2016• 1

By DAVID INTROCASO

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Nearly a year ago President Obama signed the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) into law. MACRA, among other things, repeals the 1997 Balanced Budget Act’s Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula for calculating annual updates to Medicare Part B physician and other eligible professionals’ payment rates.1 The bill received overwhelming support in both the House and Senate, only 45 out of 529 total votes cast opposed the bill despite the fact the legislation is estimated to add $141 billion to the federal deficit by 2025.2 Support for the legislation can, in part, be attributed to the Congress having grown tired of rescinding SGR mandated payment cuts or passing nearly 20 “doc fix” “patches,” over 18 years. Presently, Medicare physicians are awaiting CMS’s proposed rule that will define how the agency intends to implement the six sections of MACRA Title I, or how the agency will annually update physician performance beginning in 2019 based on the use of the law’s Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) and its Alternative Payment Models (APMs) pathway. The proposed rule, expected to be published in the next few weeks, is highly anticipated because the rewards and penalties under either MIPS and APMs can be significant.