Fierce Health Payers January 23, 2020
It’s an idea that could save Medicare billions of dollars a year, but it would have a major impact on physicians’ revenue—cutting payments to surgeons and increasing those to primary care doctors.
The idea is to reduce bundled payments for surgical procedures, which include post-operative visits that in many cases never happen, according to a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The study, funded by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), found Medicare would have saved about $2.6 billion in 2018 by decreasing surgical payments to reflect postoperative care that surgeons are actually providing and accounting for those post-operative visits the government pays for as part of procedure bundles that aren’t taking place.
If...