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) | Publication |
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Hospice servicesFor fiscal year 2022, the Congress should eliminate the update to the 2021 Medicare base payment rates for hospice and wage adjust and reduce the hospice aggregate cap by 20 percent. |
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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. |
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Inpatient rehabilitation facility servicesFor fiscal year 2022, the Congress should reduce the 2021 Medicare base payment rate for inpatient rehabilitation facilities by 5 percent. |
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Long-term care hospital servicesFor fiscal year 2022, the Secretary should increase the 2021 Medicare base payment rate for long-term care hospitals by 2 percent. |
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Outpatient dialysis servicesFor calendar year 2022, the Congress should eliminate the update to the 2021 Medicare end-stage renal disease prospective payment system base rate. |
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Physician and other health professional servicesFor calendar year 2022, the Congress should update the 2021 Medicare payment rates for physician and other health professional services by the amounts determined under current law. |
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Skilled nursing facility servicesFor fiscal year 2022, the Congress should eliminate the update to the 2021 Medicare base payment rates for skilled nursing facilities. |
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Challenges in maintaining and increasing savings from accountable care organizationsThe Secretary should use the same set of national provider identifiers to compute both performance-year and baseline assignment for accountable care organizations in the Medicare Shared Savings Program. |
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Improving Medicare’s end-stage renal disease prospective payment system (1)The Congress should direct the Secretary to eliminate the end-stage renal disease prospective payment system’s transitional drug add-on payment adjustment for new drugs in an existing end-stage renal disease functional category. |
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Improving Medicare’s end-stage renal disease prospective payment system (2)The Secretary should replace the current low-volume and rural payment adjustments in the end-stage renal disease prospective payment system with a single adjustment for dialysis facilities that are isolated and consistently have low volume, where low-volume criteria are empirically derived. |
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