A federal court has provided relief to hospitals that saw reduced Medicare payments for some outpatient services in 2019.

But that relief is only partial.

In response to a suit filed by several hospital groups, a federal court ruled that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid services had illegally reduced Medicare payments for services provided in some hospital off-campus outpatient departments beginning on January 1, 2019 and ordered the federal government to repay the hospitals for the Medicare revenue they lost.  The reduced payments were part of a new Medicare site-neutral payment policy for outpatient services, and CMS has announced a plan for reimbursing affected hospitals for their losses.

At the same time, however, CMS announced that despite the court’s ruling, it will implement the same policy of reduced payments for outpatient care provided in some hospitals’ off-campus outpatient departments in 2020, and an effort by hospitals to persuade the court to ban this payment reduction was rejected by the same court that ruled against CMS on the 2019 payments.

Learn more about the ruling that CMS must reimburse  hospitals for lost payments in the Healthcare Dive article “Hospital group cheers CMS move to pay back outpatient payment cuts.”  Learn about the court decision not to impose the same decision on 2020 payments in the Fierce Healthcare article “Judge strikes down AHA’s bid to halt CMS’ site-neutral payment cuts for 2020.”