https://mailchi.mp/a44243cd0759/the-weekly-gist-february-3-2023?e=d1e747d2d8

This week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) finalized a 2018 proposed rule that will impose aggressive audits on Medicare Advantage (MA) insurers. By extrapolating the audits to insurers’ entire contracts, CMS expects to claw back almost $500M annually in overpayments since 2018, but has opted not to extrapolate the audits for 2011 to 2017. While MA insurers threaten to sue over the rule’s exclusion of a “fee-for-service adjustor” that would have reduced the degree of overpayments, CMS officials note that the estimated repayments under the final rule constitute less than 0.2 percent of total MA spending. 

The Gist: This MA overpayment audit is overdue, especially given how well-documented MA overbilling has become. This week the Biden administration also announced a proposed change to MA risk adjustment that would reduce MA spending by $11B annually.

Though nearly half of all US seniors are now enrolled in MA plans, the program has yet to achieve its original purpose of saving the government money by encouraging competition around delivering care more efficiently. 

MA cannot continue to cost more per enrollee than traditional Medicare in perpetuity, and an eventual reduction in per-member per-year payments is inevitable.