“I am not sure that simply being in an alternative payment model, which was the metric the Obama administration used, is the one that I would find to be substantive and real in terms of transformation of our health care system,” Mr. Azar said June 20 at a forum hosted by the Washington Post.
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Alex M. Azar II
The previous administration set a goal of having at least 50% of physician Medicare payments tied to quality by the end of this year. It’s first milestone of 30% by the end of 2016 was reached in March of that year.
The current administration may have had a tough time meeting the 50% goal because of changes it made to the Quality Payment Program exempted two-thirds of eligible clinicians from the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System track in 2018.
Mr. Azar said that he is working with the team at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to come up with a better way to determine whether paying for quality is effective.
“What I don’t want to do is have an approach where it’s a tag the base, hit a scorecard number,” he said. “We genuinely want to revolutionize how health care is paid for in this country in an outcome-based, health-based, non-procedure-, non-sickness-based way. We are working on that. We want to get to real concrete metrics.”
Mr. Azar also noted that the agency is working on “the concrete strategy for the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation. That will also have dimensions for what we are doing within the fee-for-service program and Medicare Advantage around moving toward value-based payment arrangements.”
He praised the efforts of the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration as providing a good foundation for the transition to paying for quality and “we will build on that.”