Panel:
Medicare Payment Initiatives
(Health Policy)
Saturday, November 10, 2018: 10:15 AM-11:45 AM
Harding - Mezz Level (Marriott Wardman Park)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Panel Chairs: Silda Nikaj, National Institutes of Health
Discussants: Cuiping Schiman, Northwestern University and Jason Ward, University of Illinois, Chicago
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have expressed a desire that half of payments to providers through traditional Medicare be made through alternative payment arrangements by the end of 2018. Among these policies include Medicare’s Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) which penalizes hospitals for high readmission rates, the Medicare’s Oncology Care Model (OCM) which incentivizes care coordination and cost efficiency in office-based cancer care, and the Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) program which adjusts hospital payment based on efficiency, among other things. Changes to improve the functioning of the Medicare Advantage (MA) markets have also been made, including updates in the “urban floor” benchmark payment rates. In this session, the authors examine topics stemming from Medicare payment initiatives. Specifically, one paper uses HRRP to assess the effects of hospital consolidation on quality while another paper generates efficiency measures relevant to VBP. In the physician office setting, a third paper focuses on the spillover effects of the OCM program on non-Medicare patients, while the fourth paper leverages MA variation to assess multimarket contact effects on price and quality in the health insurance markets.
