Category: Payment Reform

Doctors Abusing Medicare Face Fines and Expulsion – NYTimes.com

 

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is cracking down on doctors who repeatedly overcharge Medicare patients, and for the first time in more than 30 years the government may disclose how much is paid to individual doctors treating Medicare patients.

Marilyn B. Tavenner, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said that “recalcitrant providers” would face civil fines and could be expelled from Medicare and other federal health programs.

In a directive that took effect on Jan. 15 but received little attention, Ms. Tavenner indicated that the agency was losing patience with habitual offenders. She ordered new steps to identify and punish such doctors.

A recalcitrant provider is defined as one who is “abusing the program and not changing inappropriate behavior even after extensive education to address these behaviors.” Cases will be referred to Daniel R. Levinson, the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services, who has authority to impose civil fines and exclude doctors from Medicare, Medicaid and other programs. 

Federal officials estimate that 10 percent of payments in the traditional fee-for-service Medicare program are improper. That would suggest at least $6 billion a year in improper payments under Medicare’s physician fee schedule. But Malcolm K. Sparrow, a Harvard professor and an expert on health care fraud, has said the losses could be greater because the official statistics “fail to accurately capture fraud rates” in Medicare.

A new section of the Medicare manual encourages the use of fines to penalize doctors who generate a pattern of claims for goods and services that they know or “should know” are not medically necessary. Providers can also be barred from Medicare if they bill the program for “excessive charges” or for services substantially in excess of patients’ needs.

In a new report, Mr. Levinson said Medicare officials and contractors should focus on doctors with the highest Medicare billings because they often received improper payments. He said that about 300 doctors received more than $3 million each in yearly Medicare payments and that one-third of them had been singled out for special reviews because of questionable billings.

Doctors Abusing Medicare Face Fines and Expulsion – NYTimes.com

Want to know the future of Obamacare? Take a look at Fort Dodge, Iowa.

 

In Fort Dodge, this is changing. UnityPoint Health (which was, until this week, named Iowa Health System) is one of the 32 Pioneer Accountable Care Organizations that volunteered to have part of their Medicare payments tethered to a set of quality metrics.

While UnityPoint has hospitals across the state, it decided to focus its ACO effort on a relatively small segment of its population to limit the health system’s exposure to the possibility of losing money on the endeavor.

“If we completely missed the mark, we knew it wouldn’t be disastrous from a financial standpoint,” UnityPoint President Bill Leaver said. “We knew it wouldn’t be overwhelming, but a good size to start with.”

The Pioneer ACOs launched Jan. 1, 2012, and for the first year, the program only required them to report quality metrics. Their payments would not yet depend on how well they met 33 measures.

The most difficult part of preparing to move to a system that pays for value rather than volume in Fort Dodge was asking doctors to rethink how they do their jobs. They would be encouraged to delegate relatively routine care, for example, to other advanced practitioners, while focusing their own work on care management.

“That is harder work than we thought,” Leaver said. “For physicians, they run the office and they’re the captain of the ship. Instead of seeing a strep patient now, you might have other people working for you that you’re going to deploy.”

Overall, Leaver describes his experience with the ACO Pioneer program as “generally positive.” What he likes most about the program is that, when the hospital gets a lump sum for each patient, it has more control over treatment. The health system can prescribe treatments that Medicare would not traditionally reimburse.

Want to know the future of Obamacare? Take a look at Fort Dodge, Iowa.

How Medicare Fails the Elderly – NYTimes.com

How Medicare Fails the Elderly – NYTimes.com:

“HERE is the dirty little secret of health care in America for the elderly, the one group we all assume has universal coverage thanks to the 1965 Medicare law: what Medicare paid for then is no longer what recipients need or want today. “

Goes on to delineate some of the problems with the Medicare payment system, that are not news if you’ve been paying attention, but always good to get it out there for further discussion.

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Hospitalists’ Take on Baucus Bill

From The Hospitalist Web site

Addition of a hospital value-based purchasing (VBP) program to Medicare beginning in 2012. The program would tie incentive payments to performance on quality measures related to such conditions as heart failure, pneumonia, surgical care, and patient perceptions of care. So far, the program’s rough outlines have been well received. “We fundamentally support hospital value-based purchasing,” Dr. Siegal says. “We think it’s a necessary step in the evolution to higher-value health care in general.”

Expansion of the Physician’s Quality Reporting Initiative, with a 1% payment penalty by 2012 for nonparticipants. The bill also would direct the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to improve the appeals process and feedback mechanism. Although the Baucus plan’s “mark” doesn’t discuss transitioning to pay-for-performance, Dr. Siegal says the shift likely is inevitable. In the meantime, pay-for-reporting can encourage better outcomes through a public reporting mechanism and “grease the skids” for a pay-for-performance initiative.

Creation of a CMS Payment Innovation Center “authorized to test, evaluate, and expand different payment structures and methodologies,” with a goal of improving quality and reducing Medicare costs. Dr. Siegal says the proposal is consistent with SHM’s aims. “We have for a long time advocated for a robust capability to test new payment models and to figure out what works better than what we have right now,” he says.

Establishment of a three-year Medicare pilot called the Community Care Transitions Program. The program would spend $500 million over 10years on efforts to reduce preventable rehospitalizations. SHM’s Project BOOST (Better Outcomes for Older Adults through Safe Transitions) likely would qualify. “We’re very positive about that,” Dr. Siegal says. “I think there is a huge amount of scrutiny now on avoidable rehospitalizations. We think BOOST is a step in the right direction, and we’d love to see greater funding to roll this out on a much larger basis.”

For more information on the current healthcare reform debate, visit SHM’s advocacy portal.

Bryn Nelson wrote the piece for The Hospitalist, and Eric Siegal, MD, is chair of the Society of Hospital Medicine’s Public Policy Committee.

Annals of Medicine: The Cost Conundrum: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Annals of Medicine: The Cost Conundrum: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker:

A damning look by Atul Gawande at the way we pay for medical care in America. The final three paragraphs of this must read article.

“Something even more worrisome is going on as well. In the war over the culture of medicine—the war over whether our country’s anchor model will be Mayo or McAllen—the Mayo model is losing. In the sharpest economic downturn that our health system has faced in half a century, many people in medicine don’t see why they should do the hard work of organizing themselves in ways that reduce waste and improve quality if it means sacrificing revenue.

“In El Paso, the for-profit health-care executive told me, a few leading physicians recently followed McAllen’s lead and opened their own centers for surgery and imaging. When I was in Tulsa a few months ago, a fellow-surgeon explained how he had made up for lost revenue by shifting his operations for well-insured patients to a specialty hospital that he partially owned while keeping his poor and uninsured patients at a nonprofit hospital in town. Even in Grand Junction, Michael Pramenko told me, “some of the doctors are beginning to complain about ‘leaving money on the table.’ ”

“As America struggles to extend health-care coverage while curbing health-care costs, we face a decision that is more important than whether we have a public-insurance option, more important than whether we will have a single-payer system in the long run or a mixture of public and private insurance, as we do now. The decision is whether we are going to reward the leaders who are trying to build a new generation of Mayos and Grand Junctions. If we don’t, McAllen won’t be an outlier. It will be our future.”

I went to the Dartmouth Atlas web site myself and found this interesting tid-bit:



I think it fits in well with the ethos described in Gawande’s article.

It is much easier to continue aggressive treatment rather than spend time having an honest discussion about the benefits and burdens of continuing treatment.


Thanks to whoever put the link up on the Howard Dean Webinar tonight!



UPDATE: This recent Archives of Internal Medicine article is particularly apporpriate:
http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/169/10/954

This also, perversely, can make the hospital statistics in mortality look good, as well. As an intensivist, I can get almost ANYONE out of the the ICU and subsequently out of the hospital if I ignore the true outcome for the patient and the family: additional suffering, minimal prolongation of a life at its end, and so on.

My colleagues who do practice best EOL practices know that our ICU and hospital mortality numbers suffer, but I have no doubt that having honest discussions with my patients and families is the right thing to do. You may have heard this for your patients, “Thanks for the straight talk, Doc,” or “Nobody talked to me about my prognosis before.”

Of course, this is not new information, but we still need to do better as physicians:http://www.chestjournal.org/content/128/1/465.full?ck=nck

A Healthy Blog » Payment Reform Commission Looks At Payment Systems

A Healthy Blog » Payment Reform Commission Looks At Payment Systems:

“The Payment Reform Commission held its fourth meeting on Tuesday, February 24th. The Commission discussed episode-based payment models and evidence-based purchasing at length. Meeting materials are available here. Our full report is below the fold.

“Consultant Michael Bailit began the meeting by updating the Commission on feedback received from stakeholder input sessions. Bailit, Commissioner Iselin and Administration and Finance staff are conducting three rounds of meetings with stakeholders to gather feedback on the payment reform process.”

This is a nice introduction to payment reform, including a section at the end discussing the potential uses of Comparative Effectiveness Research, and also of possible backlash against such work.