Medicare alternative payment programs should require doctors to prove they deserve the increased fees associated with such program, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.

Participating in such programs alone should not be enough to earn physicians larger payments, MedPAC wrote in its annual report to Congress. Instead, alternative payment programs should be structured to demonstrate that physicians’ participation improves the quality of care their patients receive, reduces Medicare costs, or both. Without such a requirement, increased payments could become embedded into the system as an added cost without providing added value.

To learn more about what MedPAC has proposed and why it has proposed it see this article from CQ Roll Call presented by the Commonwealth Fund and go here to chapter two (“Medicare’s new framework for paying clinicians”) of MedPAC’s annual report to Congress.