Sorry, industry: Covid-19 won’t stop CMS from regulating

On Friday, CMS finalized a few noteworthy changes to its policies governing private Medicare plans. Among them: increasing how much patient complaints about a Medicare plan impacts that plan’s “star rating,” which has a serious impact on how much plans get paid by the federal government. That idea, in particular, was opposed by two health insurance lobbying groups, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) and the Better Medicare Alliance.

A number of stakeholders, including AHIP, recommended that CMS delay the implementation of certain changes to the policies until after the Covid-19 pandemic has subsided. But CMS ignored that recommendation. “CMS agrees that there is a lot of uncertainty about how COVID-19 will impact the healthcare system. However, we still believe that it is important to move forward with some limited Star Ratings changes to further emphasize the importance of patient experience/complaints."