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Commission Recommendations

MedPAC makes recommendations to the Congress and to the Secretary of Health and Human Services on issues affecting the administration of the Medicare program. With its recommendations, the Commission strives to improve the delivery of care, while ensuring financial stability and maximizing value for the program. After extensive analysis and evaluation, our recommendations are discussed and voted on by Commissioners in our public meetings. Recommendations are typically published in two main reports, released in March and June of each year.

Recommendations	Topic(s)	Date
Prospective payment for post-acute care: current issues and long-term agenda (A) The Secretary should conduct an empirical study to assess the extent of substitution among post-acute care settings.	Post-acute care	March 2001
Prospective payment for post-acute care: current issues and long-term agenda (B) While implementing the Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP Benefits Improvement and Protection Act of 2000 provision to develop patient assessment instruments with comparable common data elements, the Secretary should minimize reporting burden and unnecessary complexity while assuring that only necessary data are collected for payment and quality monitoring.	Post-acute care	March 2001
Prospective payment for post-acute care: current issues and long-term agenda (C) The Secretary should develop for potential implementation a patient classification system that predicts costs within and across post-acute settings.	Delivery system reforms Post-acute care	March 2001
Prospective payment for post-acute care: current issues and long-term agenda (D) The Secretary should conduct demonstrations to test the feasibility of including a larger scope of services in the payment bundle.	Post-acute care	March 2001
Prospective payment for post-acute care: current issues and long-term agenda (E) The Secretary should develop a new classification system for skilled nursing facility care while continuing to monitor access and quality.	Delivery system reforms Post-acute care	March 2001
Prospective payment for post-acute care: current issues and long-term agenda (F) Until a core set of common data elements for post-acute care is developed, the Secretary should require the Functional Independence Measure as the patient assessment tool for the inpatient rehabilitation prospective payment system.	Post-acute care	March 2001
Prospective payment for post-acute care: current issues and long-term agenda (G) The Secretary should require a high-cost outlier policy of 5 percent for the inpatient rehabilitation payment system and study whether a different percentage policy is needed.	Post-acute care	March 2001
Prospective payment for post-acute care: current issues and long-term agenda (H) The Secretary should reexamine the disproportionate share adjustment for the inpatient rehabilitation prospective payment system.	Post-acute care	March 2001
Prospective payment for post-acute care: current issues and long-term agenda (I) In monitoring the performance of the payment system, the Secretary should pay particular attention to the use of significant change in condition payment adjustments and payments for patients with wound care needs.	Post-acute care	March 2001
Financial performance and payment update for facilities exempt from prospective payment The Secretary should increase the target amount update formula for fiscal year 2001 by up to 0.3 percentage points above the market basket amount.	Post-acute care	June 2000