Please find the PDF version sent to the Administration here & the version sent to Congress here.
Dear Mr. President and Mr. Vice-President:
On behalf of the nation’s leading clinicians, employers, hospitals, biopharmaceutical companies, pharmacists, patients, consumer groups and insurance providers, we are writing to underscore our commitment to advancing the highest quality, most cost-effective healthcare system in the world. We call upon Congress and the Trump Administration to help us achieve this goal.
Healthcare has been operating in a fee-for-service system designed more than 50 years ago. Over the years, the regulations governing this system have grown extraordinarily complex. This complexity hampers efforts of clinicians and other healthcare providers who have been diligently working to measurably improve quality, reduce costs and take accountability for populations of patients. Despite these impediments, organizations have made significant investments in building and testing alternative payment models that are designed to move healthcare forward to promote value.
This work has been spurred by nearly two decades of bipartisan leadership and was most recently accelerated by this Congress’ overwhelming passage of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA). Through private and public sector alignment, the move toward value-based care is succeeding, measurably improving healthcare quality and contributing to historically low costs. Now is not the time for policymakers to signal a shift away from value based care, either through action or inaction.
We, the undersigned, strongly support this movement and are committed to working with Congress and the Trump Administration to build the next generation of healthcare policy. 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. Together, we share a vision for a modernized, sustainable healthcare system based on the following principles:
- Empower and engage patients to make healthcare decisions with information and support from their healthcare team.
- Invest in engaging patients in the development of measures of provider performance that are relevant to them and consistently and transparently reported by all public and private payers.
- Improve clinician and provider access to timely, accurate and complete claims data to better facilitate care management.
- Recognize that the socioeconomic status of many patients creates challenges in providing care, and adjust payments to providers as appropriate.
- Design voluntary payment models that incent greater participation and achieve the highest quality and cost value based on patient choice and competitive markets.
- Expand the use of waivers from fee-for-service legal and regulatory requirements that impede collaboration and shared accountability, while preserving consumer protections and safeguards against fraud.
- Build on and expand payment models that promote collaborative financial and care coordination arrangements using incentives that align payers, healthcare providers, providers of long-term care services and clinicians.
- Appropriately incent access to medical innovations and treatments that hold the potential to improve quality of care and reduce overall system cost.
- Promote public and private investment in the transparent, evidence-based testing and scaling of new alternative payment models as directed in MACRA so that clinicians, other healthcare providers and payers can learn how payment models work and evolve in the clinical setting.
- Ensure alignment between private and public sector programs, which is critical to a sustainable value-based payment marketplace.
We stand prepared to work vigorously with the Administration and the Congress to expand upon the quality and cost savings progress made in America, and we look forward to taking the next steps to reach and surpass the tipping point where value-based healthcare becomes a sustainable marketplace for generations of Americans to come.