Fierce Healthcare: MedPAC considers one-time funding boosts for Medicare in 2023 due to COVID-19 confusion

From Fierce Healthcare: A key Medicare advisory panel is debating one-time funding boosts to providers for 2023 due to questions on how COVID-19 has permanently impacted the healthcare industry. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), which gives Congress advice on Medicare payment issues, discussed during its Thursday meeting how the pandemic will affect payment adequacy in 2023. But members of the panel were concerned about what the healthcare industry will look like that far out, especially for providers. MedPAC will look at healthcare use data from 2020 to help determine payment adequacy, but members were skeptical about what they can glean from data in 2020 and 2021 since the drops in care were temporary. “I think it is extremely challenging to look at the data and tease out what is permanent, what is dynamic and what is temporary,” said member Amol Navathe, Ph.D., co-director of the Healthcare Transformation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine. Read the full story in Fierce Healthcare.