Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) and Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-IA) have released a set of policy options for transforming the health care delivery system to improve patient care and reduce health care costs.
Among other options, their proposals would:
- Establish a Medicare value-based purchasing program for hospitals and begin to pay hospitals for their actual performance on quality measures beginning in 2013;
- Reduce payments to hospitals with high readmission rates for certain conditions;
- Bundle payments for hospital and post-acute care services within 30 days of hospital discharge;
- Redistribute unused graduate medical education slots to increase access to primary care; and
- Ban physician self-referral to a hospital in which the physician has an ownership interest, subject to certain requirements.