Medicare

President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2020 budget includes a wide-ranging collection of Medicare proposals that the administration says would add eight years to the solvency of the Medicare Trust Fund, including reducing bad debt and uncompensated care payments to hospitals, moving closer to site-neutral payments among providers and creating a primary care pay bump by cutting reimbursement for other physician services.

The House Judiciary Committee heard competing views from stakeholders on the effects of rural hospital mergers: Economics and health policy experts testified to sympathetic lawmakers that the mergers hurt competition and thus hike prices and lower quality, but the American Hospital Association argued in a statement that rural hospital mergers improve value-based care.

Congressional Medicare advisers Thursday (March 7) debated the merits of two of Washington’s hottest drug-pricing policy topics: reference pricing and binding arbitration.

Senate Finance Committee Chair Charles Grassley said most senators in both parties think capping seniors’ out-of-pocket costs in Part D is a good idea, though he hasn’t begun negotiating that legislation, which he said would likely be wrapped into a bigger health care bill.

CMS may start terminating the contracts of Medicare Advantage and Part D plans that receive consistently low star ratings -- but not until 2022 at the earliest, the agency told plans in a memo last month.

Top administration aide Joe Grogan said Monday (March 4) that implementing recommendations from a December White House report entitled Reforming America’s Health Care System Through Choice and Competition is a top priority for the administration.

A former senior privacy official at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) is concerned one of ONC’s recently proposed exceptions to information blocking would allow organizations to refuse to share electronic health information (EHI) by misapplying the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy law to their internal policies.

Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee Chair Lamar Alexander (R-TN) told Inside Health Policy Wednesday (Feb. 27) he supports the Trump administration’s proposed demonstration to reference drug prices in Medicare Part B to a market basket of foreign countries.

CMS publicly updated the overall hospital star ratings on Thursday (Feb. 28) even as the agency says it is looking at possible changes to how those ratings are calculated for both the short and long term, and hospitals say CMS should have waited until changes were put in place before updating the ratings.