The following slides show the timeline for the components of the delivery reform portion of the healthcare bill and how it is proposed it will be funded.
The first of the attached slides shows what provider systems should expect from the health reform bill over the next 10 years.The second slide shows how it will be paid for. As you can see the bill will paid for by reducing revenues to hospitals and other providers,reducing payments to Medicare Advantage health plans, as well as increasing Medicare taxes and other taxes on certain industry suppliers such as device makers.
The budget neutrality of the healthcare reform bill assumes that the sustainable growth (SGR) rate reduction for physician payments be implemented each year for the life of the legislation. For example physician payments from Medicare were supposed to go down 21% today but the senate voted in favor of repealing this reduction for 6 more months. If the SGR continues to be repealed over the next 10 years it will add over 200 billion dollars of cost to healthcare. I think we can safely say that is highly likely. I think we can also say it is highly unlikely the proposals to pay for the healthcare bill are going to be budget neutral. This most likely means even further payment cuts to hospitals and other providers of care.
These realities make it even more important for healthcare leadership teams to develop a game plan to remove waste and reduce the cost of delivering care. We encourage you to join the Healthcare Value Leaders Network where learning from those committed to the lean transformation journey continues to show remarkable cost and quality improvements are possible.
Implementation guidelinePayment for bill
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