On June 22, 2023, Paragon Senior Policy Analyst Joe Albanese was quoted in MedPage Today’s story “MACRA Gets Mixed Reviews at House Hearing”
From the article:
“Despite the good intentions of policymakers, MACRA has not solved the issues with how Medicare pays doctors,” Joe Albanese, policy analyst at the Paragon Health Institute, said at a House Energy & Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee hearing opens in a new tab or window to assess how successful the law has been. In addition, “MACRAs’ value-based care programs have not significantly improved the quality of healthcare services.”
Albanese outlined the two “tracks” of the Quality Payment Program implemented under MACRA: Under the first track, the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), participating clinicians receive rewards or penalties based on their performance. Under the second track, clinicians receive annual bonuses for participating in certain types of alternative payment models (APMs). Unfortunately, he said, the Quality Payment Program has been disappointing on both fronts.
Under MIPS, for instance, physicians can choose which quality indicators they report on, “which allows them to hide poor performance,” said Albanese. In addition, the program’s complicated reporting requirements “have been administratively costly, particularly for small practices.”
