PoliticoPro: By Rachel Roubein
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released the Medicare Advantage rate notice for 2020, a proposal letting insurers know how much the federal government plans to pay them to cover Medicare beneficiaries. The agency also proposed new payment policies for Part D plans. Read the proposals here.
PoliticoPro: By Adam Cancryn and Rachel Roubein
The Trump administration is proposing to increase average payments to Medicare Advantage plans by roughly 1.59 percent in 2020 and provide new leeway for insurers to offer benefits targeted at the chronically ill.
The CMS draft call letter published this evening would permit health plans to provide additional services to certain patients, such as transportation or home-delivered meals, food and produce.
Those patients would need to meet certain criteria to qualify as chronically ill. But the new flexibility comes after Congress passed a law letting Medicare Advantage plans offer non-traditional medical benefits to beneficiaries with chronic illnesses beginning next year.
Traditionally, Medicare Advantage plans could only provide “primarily health related” supplemental benefits, which had to be uniform to all enrollees. Starting in 2019, CMS gave plans greater leeway to cover non-medical benefits for some enrollees, a change that was cheered by insurers.
