Why MACRA Is a Big Step Forward for Fee-for-Value Health Care

When Congress sent a "doc-fix" bill to the president's desk a year ago, the moment was hailed as a turning point, ending the perennial anxiety felt by providers in anticipation of Medicare's physician-payment updates. Signed into law on April 16, 2015, the Medicare Access & CHIP Reauthorization Act, or MACRA, repealed the sustainable growth rate, or SGR, an aspect of Medicare's payment structure that could have drastically cut payments to doctors and potentially limited access for Medicare beneficiaries. But as celebrated as MACRA was at the time for ending the widely unpopular method of setting fees, the law's true impact will be felt in the long term. It introduced a new payment structure aimed at rewarding physicians for high quality, good patient outcomes and efficiency, rather than volume of services. To be sure, insurers had been moving in the same direction before the law was enacted, but the participation of Medicare -- the largest payer of them all, with its 55.5 million beneficiaries -- will provide the critical mass to help drive fundamental reform of the health care system. The law is a clear signal to the country's physicians that fee-for-service -- for decades the primary way business was done in health care -- will one day soon be the exception, not the norm. It's no longer enough to perform health care services, bill for them and get reimbursed. The insurers, purchasers and consumers who pay for care want high quality and good outcomes, and they want to ...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news