Mayo & Johns Hopkins CEOs Want Buffer Between Congress & Medicare

Posted by Sarah Rubenstein on the Wall Street Journal Health Blog After this summer’s mess over how much Medicare pays doctors, is it any wonder that leaders at Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins want Congress to have less control over the big government program? Mayo CEO Denis Cortese and Johns Hopkins Medicine CEO Edward Miller argue on the op-ed page of today’s Chicago Tribune that instead of Congress, some sort of board should make big decisions about Medicare’s payment policies. Decisions about coverage and payments are inappropriately subject to political influences and inefficiencies. Why should Congress spend time debating how much Medicare should pay for the rental of oxygen supplies? A non-political board could better fulfill the role of overseeing Medicare. The board should function like the Federal Reserve—with independent authority, but reporting to Congress. It’s really the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that decides, within the framework of current law, what Medicare covers and how generously, a CMS spokesman tells the Health Blog. But Congress can step in to make policy adjustments. (A big example is the creation of the Medicare drug benefit.) Meantime, the two CEOs also acknowledge in their op-ed some failures of medical practitioners. For one, they note that overuse of new procedures and medical technologies drives costs up. “Medicare must expand efforts to evaluate when it makes sense to use promising new technology, and when it’s best to use traditional approaches,” they write. But hospitals and doctors need to do their part. The CEOs say that medical providers should disclose prices as part of an “open market” instead of “price controls” — read: Medicare payment caps. (Though, many argue that’s Medicare pricing has helped keep costs in check.)