Commission Recommendations
MedPAC makes recommendations to the Congress and to the Secretary of Health and Human Services on issues affecting the administration of the Medicare program. With its recommendations, the Commission strives to improve the delivery of care, while ensuring financial stability and maximizing value for the program. After extensive analysis and evaluation, our recommendations are discussed and voted on by Commissioners in our public meetings. Recommendations are typically published in two main reports, released in March and June of each year.
| Recommendations | Topic(s) | Date |
|---|---|---|
Hospital inpatient and outpatient servicesFor fiscal year 2025, the Congress should update the 2024 Medicare base payment rates for general acute care hospitals by the amount specified in current law plus 1.5 percent. In addition, the Congress should: |
|
March 2024 |
Reforming Medicare’s wage index systemsThe Congress should repeal the existing Medicare wage index statutes, including current exceptions, and require the Secretary to phase in new Medicare wage index systems for hospitals and other types of providers that: |
|
June 2023 |
Hospital inpatient and outpatient services (1)For fiscal year 2024, the Congress should update the 2023 Medicare base payment rates for general acute care hospitals by the amount specified in current law plus 1 percent. |
|
March 2023 |
Hospital inpatient and outpatient services (2)In fiscal year 2024, the Congress should: |
|
March 2023 |
Hospital inpatient and outpatient servicesFor fiscal year 2023, the Congress should update the 2022 Medicare base payment rates for acute care hospitals by the amount specified in current law. |
|
March 2022 |
Improving Medicare’s policies for separately payable drugs in the hospital outpatient prospective payment system (1)The Congress should direct the Secretary to modify the pass-through drug policy in the hospital outpatient prospective payment system so that it: includes only drugs and biologics that function as supplies to a service and applies only to drugs and biologics that are clinically superior to their packaged analogs. |
|
June 2021 |
Improving Medicare’s policies for separately payable drugs in the hospital outpatient prospective payment system (2)The Secretary should specify that the separately payable non-pass-through policy in the hospital outpatient prospective payment system applies only to drugs and biologics that are the reason for a visit and meet a defined cost threshold. |
|
June 2021 |
Revising Medicare’s indirect medical education payments to better reflect teaching hospitals’ costsThe Congress should require CMS to transition to empirically justified indirect medical education adjustments to both inpatient and outpatient Medicare payments. |
|
June 2021 |
Hospital inpatient and outpatient servicesFor fiscal year 2022, the Congress should update the 2021 Medicare base payment rates for acute care hospitals by 2 percent. |
|
March 2021 |
Hospital inpatient and outpatient servicesThe Congress should: For 2021, update the 2020 Medicare base payment rates for acute care hospitals by 2 percent; and Provide hospitals with an amount equal to the difference between the update recommendation and the amount specified in current law through the Commission’s recommended hospital value incentive program (HVIP) |
|
March 2020 |