The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission’s recent breakdown of the hospital sector’s financial viability largely struck a different tone from the doom and gloom industry groups have voiced as of late, reports Fierce Healthcare. With the exception of additional support for safety-net providers—which industry group America’s Essential Hospitals (AEH) has already criticized for “overlooking” uncompensated care delivered to non-Medicare patients—the group largely told Congress that most hospitals will manage their finances and recommended that lawmakers stay the course with 2024’s inpatient prospective payment system (IPPS) and outpatient prospective payment system (OPPS) rules.
In an accompanying letter to Congress, MedPAC Chair Michael Chernew, Ph.D., said “the Commission is acutely aware of how providers’ financial status and patterns of Medicare spending varied in 2020 and 2021 from historical trends, as well as the higher and more volatile increases in input costs for several health care sectors that occurred during 2022.” Read more.
