Economic Crisis May Break Medicare by 2016, Three
Years Earlier than Last Forecast
CMS announces programs to reduce costs of Medicare
Fee-For-Service plan, hopes to influence health care reform
Jan. 19, 2009 – In a news release announcing
efforts to reduce costs in the Medicare Fee-For-Service Program, the
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services says the current economic
crisis could cause the primary trust that funds Medicare to go broke in
just seven years, according to Medicare’s chief actuary.
Last spring, the Medicare Part A Hospital Insurance
Trust Fund had been projected to go bankrupt in 2019, 11 years from
now. The Medicare chief actuary recently observed that because of the
current economic crisis, this date could be moved three years earlier to
2016.
‘We need to act quickly and effectively to address
Medicare’s fiscal health’ HHS Secretary
March 26, 2008 – As many have long known, Medicare
is under a great deal more financial stress than the Social Security
program, and this was confirmed yesterday by the annual report of the
Medicare Trustees that says Medicare’s Hospital Insurance (HI) Trust
Fund will become insolvent slightly earlier in 2019 than reported last year.
Read more...
“It is incumbent on us to use the lessons we’ve
learned with many of the tools we have implemented to help the nation’s
health care leaders as they look to improve the health care system in a
time that’s even more critical because the projected rate of growth in
health care costs is climbing at an unsustainable rate,” said Kerry
Weems, CMS acting Administrator.
The news release last Friday focused on the
issuance of Quality Measurement, Resource Use Measurement, and
Value-Based Purchasing Roadmaps for the traditional Medicare
Fee-For-Service Program.
“These documents are intended to offer a vision for
the future and potential options for CMS to pursue to improve the
quality and value of health care delivered in the United States and to
shift the Medicare FFS program away from paying providers based solely
on the volume of services and instead paying them for quality and value
of care,” said Weems..
Health care today represents one-seventh of the
economy with spending totaling more than $2 trillion annually. By 2017,
the nation is expected to spend roughly $4 trillion on health care: 21
percent of gross domestic product.
Medicare costs are continuing to skyrocket as
well.
The papers linked to
www.cms.hhs.gov/QualityInitiativesGenInfo/ outline the activities
that CMS has undertaken to implement value driven health care, including
summaries of the various projects to test the policy and concepts
designed to provide high quality, affordable health care.
The papers provide steps to implement quality and
resource use measurement to improve the delivery of care and offer a
roadmap to assist in implementing value-based purchasing for Medicare’s
FFS payment systems.
These papers are also intended to provide
information to policy makers about the demonstrations and pilot programs
that are already underway and to articulate the overarching principles
guiding further efforts.
The concept behind value-based purchasing,
according to CMS, is to encourage care delivery patterns that are not
only high quality, but also cost-efficient and to move away from the
traditional FFS payment systems that pay health care providers to
perform services without regard to their quality.
In order for a value-based purchasing payment to
function, it must be based on standardized quality measures provide
information about care that is accurate, reliable, and relevant in a
patient-centered way and also based on resource-use measures that can
evaluate health care performance in a way that enables comparisons of
how efficiently health care is delivered.
Keep up with the latest news for senior citizens, baby
boomers
Jan. 19, 2009 – In a news release announcing
efforts to reduce costs in the Medicare Fee-For-Service Program, the
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services says the current economic
crisis could cause the primary trust that funds Medicare to go broke in
just seven years, according to Medicare’s chief actuary.