New Year Brings Old Challenges to Medicare: Cost, Quality, Value

Medicare faces a transformational and turbulent new year in 2020 as the program moves to shore up its ailing finances and expand opportunities for providers to coordinate patient care.

In that vein, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will try—again—to cut Medicare payments to off-campus, hospital-based clinics next year. While a new payment system for home health agencies and five proposed new payment models for kidney-care doctors will accelerate traditional Medicare’s move to value-based care.

The private health plans that provide Medicare coverage can expand their supplemental benefit offerings next year to include services like home-delivered meals, family counseling ...