Seventeen prominent healthcare stakeholders have endorsed a bipartisan House bill called the Value in Health Care Act of 2023, aimed at reinforcing Medicare’s shift towards value-based care. The bill is supported by organizations such as the National Association of ACOs (NAACOS), Accountable for Health, American Academy of Family Physicians, American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, American College of Physicians, American Hospital Association, American Medical Association, America’s Essential Hospitals, AMGA, America’s Physician Groups, Association of American Medical Colleges, Federation of American Hospitals, Healthcare Leadership Council, Health Care Transformation Task Force, Medical Group Management Association, National Rural Health Association, and Premier, Inc.
The Value in Health Care Act of 2023 is a follow-up to the Value in Health Care Act of 2021, which aimed to introduce changes to methodologies and components used in the Medicare Shared Savings Program. The new bill seeks to enhance CMS’s value-based care programs, addressing concerns about the growth of alternative payment models (APMs) leading to an overflow in care delivery and potentially slowing healthcare spending.
Key provisions of the Value Act of 2023 include a two-year extension of the 5% advanced APM incentives created by the 2015 Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA), empowering CMS with the authority to adjust thresholds for incentive payments, eliminating the revenue-based distinction that disadvantages rural and safety net providers, establishing a fair and transparent process for setting financial spending targets for ACOs, creating a voluntary track for ACOs to assume higher levels of risk, providing technical assistance for clinicians new to APMs, and studying ways to increase parity between APMs in traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage.
According to NAACOS, ACOs have generated over $17 billion in gross savings for Medicare in the past decade and have improved care quality for millions of patients. The Value Act of 2023 aims to continue supporting ACOs and implementing improvements to promote high-quality care that links financial performance to patient outcomes, rather than the volume of services delivered.