In response to the Senate Finance Committee’s recently released white paper on Medicare payment reform, the Alliance of Specialty Medicine submitted a detailed letter that outlined actions that Congress should take to stabilize the Medicare physician payment system while ensuring successful value-based care incentives are available for specialty physicians. The Alliance’s policy recommendations included:
- Supporting the use of specialty-focused Qualified Clinical Data Registries (QCDRs) and specialty-specific measures to improve the quality of care under FFS Medicare.
- Instructing CMS to provide access to Medicare claims data to assist specialties in understanding gaps in care and developing quality and cost measures.
- Ensuring the MIPS Cost category to ensure cost-containment efforts do not result in poorer quality care or negatively impact access to care.
- Improving the Alternative Payment Model (APM) pipeline to provide more opportunities for specialists to participate meaningfully in APMs.
- Restoring and extending the full 5% APM incentive payment, releasing more granular and timely data on physician participation in MIPS and APMs by specialty, and addressing fundamental flaws in the MIPS program.