At its December 7 meeting, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) reviewed a proposal that would direct Congress to adopt a voluntary alternative to the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS).
The proposed voluntary value program (VVP) reflects MedPAC's conviction that much of the information reported under MIPS is not meaningful and that scoring clinicians on different levels of effort is not equitable.
"Overall, the system is inequitable, burdensome, and will not improve care for beneficiaries nor move the Medicare program and clinicians toward high-value care," said presenters Kate Bloniarz, Ariel Winter, and David Glass.
The proposed program would maintain the value component of Medicare fee-for-service payments, eliminate reporting of mandatory clinician measures to the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and encourage physicians to participate in advanced alternative payment models (AAPMs). It would also focus on a uniform, population-based, patient-surveyed set of measures to assess clinicians as groups rather than as individuals, according to MedPAC.
