MedPAC to Congress: Eliminate MIPS

March 16, 2018|Infectious Disease Practitioner

The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has formally recommended to Congress that it repeal the Merit-based Incentive Payment System track of Medicare’s Quality Payment Program.

MedPAC “has concluded that ... the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) will not fulfill its goals and therefore should be eliminated,” the commission said in its March 15 report to Congress. MedPAC added that the “basic design of MIPS is fundamentally incompatible with the goals of a beneficiary-focused approach to quality measurement.”

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The commission notes that the design of MIPS measures quality and adjusts payments based on measures chosen by the individual physician. “But a system built on this design will be inequitable, because clinicians will be evaluated and compared on dissimilar measures. In addition, many clinicians will not be evaluated at all because, as individuals, they will not have a sufficient number of cases for statistically reliable scores.”

MedPAC adds that, by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ own estimates, more than half of clinicians will be exempt from reporting on MIPS, based on the low-volume threshold that exempts providers who bill for $90,000 or less in Medicare claims or see 200 or fewer Medicare patients.