Regulation Description
Medicare Access and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) is the act that significantly changed the healthcare system of the United States. The act is primarily related to reimbursing medical providers. MACRA has several purposes connected with the Medicare and Children’s Health Insurance programs (Bieber et al., 2020). The first one is minimizing the expenditures of the participants of the Medicare program. The second one is advancing the quality of health care and reducing the number of unnecessary visits to clinicians through the precise control of the expenditures of the providers. The main changes include new rules for payments and reimbursements doctors receive from Medicare (Bieber et al., 2020). The Quality Payment Program was created within the scope of the MACRA, allowing medical providers to choose between two types of refund.
Legal Aspects and Impact on Healthcare Sector
The MACRA’s changes are generally related to the financial questions. Thus, the agencies responsible for overseeing the regulation are financial ones (Bieber et al., 2020). Different financial institutions such as the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation are directly connected with the distribution of resources in relation to the healthcare sphere. The most important positive change that MACRA empowered is suspending the Sustainable Growth Rate formula (Bieber et al., 2020). This approach to the reimbursement of the medical providers was inconvenient, causing many problems for the government and clinicians (Bieber et al., 2020). MACRA offered the Quality Payment Program, which helped to reduce healthcare costs by focusing on improving the quality of treatment (Bieber et al., 2020). Therefore, MACRA contributed to the positive changes in healthcare system, establishing a solid basis for future improvement and reforms.
Reference
Bieber, S., Cheng, J., Kim, J., & Lin, E. (2020). Four years into MACRA: What has changed? Seminars in Dialysis, 33(1), 26–34. Web.