The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has recommended that Congress extend the moratorium on the development of new physician-owned specialty hospitals, but its chairman urged members of Congress not to close the door on these hospitals before the potential benefits can be fully investigated.
“Frankly, the status quo in our health care system is not great,” MedPAC chairman Glenn Hackbarth testified at a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee on specialty hospitals in March. “We've got real quality and cost issues.”
MedPAC members are concerned about the potential conflict of interest in physician-owned specialty hospitals, Mr. Hackbarth said, but they are not prepared to recommend outlawing them until they see evidence on whether specialty hospitals offer increased quality of care and efficiency.
And policymakers do not yet have the answers to those questions, he said.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), the committee's ranking Democrat, are drafting legislation that will set Medicare policy on specialty hospitals.
Sen. Grassley said that he will rely on the MedPAC findings as he drafts the legislation. He is also awaiting the final results of a study on quality of care at specialty hospitals from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Officials at CMS presented preliminary findings from that study at the hearing. CMS was charged under the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 with examining referral patterns of specialty-hospital physician owners, assessing quality of care and patient satisfaction, and examining differences in the uncompensated care and tax payments between specialty hospitals and community hospitals. Based on claims analysis, the preliminary results show that quality of care at cardiac hospitals was generally at least as good and in some cases better than the quality of care at community hospitals. Complication and mortality rates were also lower at cardiac specialty hospitals even when adjusted for severity of illness.
However, a statistical assessment could not be made for surgical and orthopedic hospitals due to the small number of discharges, said Thomas A. Gustafson, Ph.D., deputy director of the Center for Medicare Management at CMS.
Patient satisfaction was high at cardiac, surgical, and orthopedic hospitals, Dr. Gustafson said, due to amenities like larger rooms and easy parking, adding that patients had a favorable perception of the clinical quality of care they received at the specialty hospitals.
But Sen. Baucus expressed skepticism about the findings and how the study was conducted. He urged caution in using the results of the CMS study as a basis for policymaking.
In its report to Congress, MedPAC recommended that the moratorium on construction of new specialty hospitals be extended another 18 months—until Jan. 1, 2007.
While MedPAC stopped short of recommending that Congress ban new specialty hospitals, the panel did recommend payment changes that would remove incentives for hospitals to treat healthier but more profitable patients.
The panel recommended that the secretary of Health and Human Services refine the current diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) to better capture differences in severity of illness among Medicare patients. It also advised the HHS secretary to base the DRG relative weights on the estimated cost of providing care, rather than on charges. And MedPAC recommended that Congress amend the law to allow the HHS secretary to adjust DRG relative weights to account for differences in the prevalence of high-cost outlier cases.
These changes would affect all hospitals that see Medicare patients and increase the accuracy and fairness of payments, Mr. Hackbarth said.
MedPAC also tried to address physicians' concerns that they do not have a say in the management of community hospitals by recommending that Congress allow the HHS secretary to permit “gainsharing” arrangements between physicians and hospitals. Gainsharing allows physicians to share in the cost savings realized from delivering efficient care in the hospital.
But even with these changes, Mr. Hackbarth said MedPAC members still have concerns about the impact of physician ownership on clinical decision making. And members of the Senate Finance Committee also raised questions about the appropriateness of physician self-referral.
“When it comes to physician ownership of specialty hospitals, I'm not sure the playing field is level,” Sen. Baucus said. Physicians are the ones who choose where patients will receive care, he said. He compared the physician owners of specialty hospitals to coaches who choose the starting lineup for both teams.
Advocates for specialty hospitals, including the American Medical Association and the American Surgical Hospital Association, are lobbying Congress to end the moratorium, saying it will allow competition and won't hurt community hospitals.
But opponents are asking Congress to close the federal self-referral-law exemption that allows physicians to invest in the “whole hospital” rather than a single department. Sen. Baucus said that surgical specialty hospitals, which on average have only 14 beds, look more like hospital departments than full-service hospitals. “This loophole may well need closing,” he said.