Medicare's final 2018 hospital payment rule set in stone a spate of policies — ranging from a withdrawn proposal that would have required accrediting bodies to make confidential hospital inspections public to a new (and unpopular) system for calculating hospitals' uncompensated care.
But a handful of other payment policy changes also will go into effect next year, pleasing the various companies and industries that lobbied the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Smaller payment cut for heart devices: Medicare proposed updating its payment system based on new medical coding data, and payments for the "other heart assist system implant" reimbursement code would have been slashed by almost 35%. The cut would have especially affected Abiomed, a company that makes heart devices.
Hospitals using that code and Abiomed's heart device are currently paid about $96,000 per treatment, and it would have been reduced to about $63,000. Abiomed lobbied Medicare officials in July to blunt the cut. Medicare agreed, and now the payment will reduced by a lower 19% rate for 2018.
Here are other nuggets embedded within Medicare's final inpatient rule, the first under Department of Health and Human Services secretary (and orthopedic surgeon) Tom Price:
