The Congress should:
- Replace Medicare’s current hospital quality programs with a new hospital value incentive program (HVIP) that:
- includes a small set of population-based outcome, patient experience, and value measures;
- scores all hospitals based on the same absolute and prospectively set performance targets;
- accounts for differences in patients’ social risk factors by distributing payment adjustments through peer grouping, and
- For 2020, update the 2019 Medicare base payment rates for acute care hospitals by 2 percent. The difference between the update recommendation and the amount specified in current law should be used to increase payments in a new HVIP.