Mary Madison, RN, RAC-CT, CDP
Clinical Consultant – Briggs Healthcare
On March 15, 2023, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) released its March 2023 Report to the Congress: Medicare Payment Policy. The report includes MedPAC’s analyses of payment adequacy in traditional fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare and reviews the status of Medicare Advantage (MA) and the prescription drug benefit (Part D). This report also satisfies an additional legislative mandate to compare per enrollee spending in the MA program with that of traditional FFS.
Three years into the coronavirus pandemic, Medicare beneficiaries, health care workers, and providers continue to experience the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though the coronavirus public health emergency will end in May of this year, COVID-19 variants continue to evolve, and the future effects of coronavirus transmission on the demand for health care services remains uncertain. In this report, we discuss some of the effects of the pandemic on beneficiaries’ access to care and on providers’ revenues and costs. However, a fuller discussion of the pandemic’s effects on beneficiaries and providers is beyond the scope of this report.
The Commission is acutely aware of how providers’ financial status and patterns of Medicare spending varied in 2020 and 2021 from historical trends, as well as the higher and more volatile increases in input costs for several health care sectors that occurred during 2022. Still, our statutory charge is to evaluate available data to assess whether Medicare payments, in aggregate, are sufficient to support the efficient delivery of care and ensure access to care for Medicare’s beneficiaries. In this report, we make recommendations aimed at giving providers incentives to constrain their cost growth and thus help control program spending.
You can view the components of this report via the following hyperlinks, including specific chapters:
- MedPAC Report – Press Release
- Executive Summary(18 pages)
- MedPAC’s Entire Report to Congress (471 pages including the Executive Summary)
Chapter 1: Context for Medicare payment policy
Chapter 2: Assessing payment adequacy and updating payments in fee-for-service Medicare
Chapter 3: Hospital inpatient and outpatient services
Chapter 4: Physician and other health professional services
Chapter 5: Ambulatory surgical center services: Status report
Chapter 6: Outpatient dialysis services
Chapter 7: Skilled nursing facility services
Chapter 8: Home health care services
Chapter 9: Inpatient rehabilitation facility services
Chapter 10: Hospice services
Chapter 11: The Medicare Advantage program: Status report
Chapter 12: The Medicare prescription drug program (Part D): Status report
Appendix A: Commissioners’ voting on recommendations
There’s something for every post-acute care provider in MedPAC’s report.
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