The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has released its semiannual report on Medicare payment policy to Congress, which includes a recommendation to axe the Merit-based Incentive Payment System.
MedPAC said it decided MIPS should be eliminated after a two-year deliberative process.
"We first examined options for improving MIPS as it was implemented, and we provided constructive feedback as CMS established rules for the first two years of the program," reads the report. "However, as we continued to explore the issue in several commission reports to the Congress, we determined that, from the commission's perspective, the basic design of MIPS is fundamentally incompatible with the goals of a beneficiary-focused approach to quality measurement."
The report noted MIPS is inequitable because it imposes different rules for clinicians based on practice size, location and other factors. MIPS also imposes a significant reporting burden and creates uncertainty for clinicians, according to the report.
"MedPAC shares Congress' goal, expressed in MIPS, of having a value component for clinician services in traditional Medicare that promotes high-quality care. However, the Commission believes that MIPS will not fulfill this goal and therefore should be eliminated," the commission wrote in its report.
MedPAC recommends Congress adopt a new model, the Voluntary Value Program.
Under the proposal, which hasn't been fully fleshed out, clinicians could qualify for payments based on their group's performance on a unified set of population-based measures.
Access the full MedPAC report here.
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