Medicare officials are attempting to figure out how to judge doctors' performance when it comes to quality of care and cost-effectiveness. This development is the result of the healthcare law's Physician Value-Based Payment Modifier that is slated to begin in 2015. According to KaiserHealthNews, CMS's deputy administrator said that the assessment "is a very important change we're putting into place, one where we're going to need a lot of feedback and deliberation."
Even so, the program is already a reality for doctors because CMS plans to base the 2015 bonuses or penalties on each doctor's results in 2013. KaiserHealthNews quotes Anders Gilbert, senior vice president at the Medical Group Management Association, as saying that this approach would be "a game changer" in terms of making physicians directly accountable for costs because Medicare is "going to be shifting money from physicians who are deemed to be high cost relative to their peers to low-cost physicians. That's going to create all kinds of new incentives in fee-for-service."
