April 2016

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” This quote attributed to Dwight Eisenhower is good advice for strategizing in an environment where one knows that the conditions will change. Such is the case with the future of revenue for health care providers in America. U.S. health care is a $2.9 trillion complex and adaptive system of entities including insurance companies, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, medical equipment manufacturers, technology companies and increasingly more stakeholders. Until recent years, the federal government had largely been a reactive participant since the advent of Medicare. For many Americans, the system has worked relatively well, with the average consumer enjoying access to quality care, state-of-the-art technology and a fair amount of options. However, the Medicare system has some glaring flaws that make it unsustainable as the population ages. The primary flaws include the unacceptably large percentage of the population without insurance and costs growing much faster than the rate of overall inflation, which led to the adoption of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). While the ACA aimed to accomplish several things, perhaps the single biggest long-term change was the creation of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI). CMMI is intended to drive changes through new payment models and performance metrics. Currently, CMMI is testing innovative payment and delivery system models that show important promise for maintaining or improving the quality of care in Medicare, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), while…