I cracked open the latest MedPAC report to read its recommendations on hospital readmissions. There wasn’t much new in it beyond what I could infer about the Commissions’ thinking in March. Still, there’s a lot more detail. You’ll find it in Chapter 4 (PDF) and the accompanying appendix (also a PDF). Some of it was reported on by Jordan Rau. All of this is ungated, which is one reason I’m giving it short shrift here.
The other reason is that I was more surprised by what I found in Chapter 1 (PDF).
Consistent with the goal of encouraging beneficiaries to make cost-conscious choices, this chapter presents an overview of a model based on government contributions toward purchasing Medicare coverage—an approach we call competitively determined plan contributions (CPCs). The Commission uses the term CPC to broadly describe a federal contribution toward coverage of the Medicare benefit based on the cost of competing options for the coverage, including those offered by private plans and the traditional FFS program. Specifically, CPC has two defining principles: First, beneficiaries receive a competitively determined federal contribution to buy Medicare coverage; second, beneficiaries’ individual premiums vary depending on the option they choose.
As far as I know, this is the first time the Commission has considered Medicare plan competitive bidding (aka, premium support) — their CPC — in this way before. To be clear, it is not recommending CPCs. It’s merely exploring the idea. The chapter hits many of the issues related to competitive bidding that have been discussed on this blog (look here and here).
Competing private plans, however, do not necessarily lower the cost to the Medicare program if the rules defining how they get paid do not encourage them to compete based on cost or premiums. For example, the current Medicare Advantage (MA) program produces a higher cost to Medicare than the traditional FFS program. Therefore, whether a CPC approach can lower overall Medicare spending depends on the specific design of the model and how different components of the model interact. […]
Medicare Part D provides a working example of a CPC approach and illustrates the range of the detail and specificity of the rules that a CPC approach requires. […]
The Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) Program also illustrates different applications of the CPC principles.
Again, you can read the chapter for details. There you’ll also find an exploration of these questions:
- Should the benefit package be standardized?
- Should a CPC model be based on competitive bidding?
- Should a CPC model include FFS Medicare?
- How should the federal contribution be determined?
These are just the “first-order” questions. A presumably high-order question, “How does the federal contribution grow over time?” was raised in the report but not addressed.
What’s interesting to me is not so much what MedPAC addressed or how they did so, since, again, I’ve covered it all here in some form. What’s interesting is that it has taken a small but significant step toward competitive bidding/premium support, not by endorsement, but just by consideration. It’s now clearly on the table for discussion by the Commission, though I don’t think this necessarily moves the political needle at all. Meanwhile, as far as I know, the Commission’s prior MA payment recommendation still stands: pay plans 100% of average fee-for-service cost.
UPDATE: MedPAC considered competitive bidding in a 2009 report. See Chapter 7 here.
