Device Companies Urge Trump to Support Value-Based Care

Dozens of healthcare organizations, including several device makers, wrote an open letter to President Donald Trump urging him and Congress to continue the pursuit of value-based care.

The organizations — representing various sectors of the industry, and including Merck, Pfizer, Sanofi, Amgen and Johnson & Johnson — said they have made significant investments in building alternative payment models, and have been seeing improvements in healthcare quality and lower costs.

The organizations committed to working with the administration and Congress to build new policy, specifically calling for an expansion of waivers from fee-for-service regulatory requirements, and for more public and private investment in the testing and scaling of new payment models.

“Now is not the time for policymakers to signal a shift away from value-based care, either through action or inaction,” they wrote, as Republicans in Congress and the White House gear up to repeal the Affordable Care Act over the coming months.

The ACA instituted several payment reforms, such as encouraging the development of accountable care organizations under Medicare. The letter also cited the “two decades of bipartisan leadership” resulting in the 2015 Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, known as MACRA or the Doc Fix, which consolidated performance incentive programs into the Merit-based Incentive Payment system.

Through private and public sector alignment, the move toward value-based care “is succeeding, measurably improving healthcare quality and contributing to historically low costs,” the letter states. “As you take up the mantle of addressing the challenge of improving quality while safely reducing costs, we strongly urge you to continue focusing on driving value-based, patient-centered payment models that incent healthcare innovation.”

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