Health Affairs May 1, 2024
Abstract
With Medicare Advantage (MA) enrollment surpassing 50 percent of Medicare beneficiaries, accurate risk-adjusted plan payment rates are essential. However, artificially exaggerated coding intensity, where plans seek to enhance measured health risk through the addition or inflation of diagnoses, may threaten payment rate integrity. One factor that may play a role in escalating coding intensity is health risk assessments (HRAs)—typically in-home reviews of enrollees’ health status—that enable plans to capture information about their enrollees. In this study, we evaluated the impact of HRAs on Hierarchical Condition Categories (HCC) risk scores, variation in this impact across contracts, and the aggregate payment...
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