The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ proposed 2027 Medicare outpatient prospective payment system rule could pose several serious challenges to hospitals.

Among them:

• A proposed increase of 2.4 percent in payments for outpatient services that could be reduced to only 0.6 percent if CMS adopts its proposal to accelerate its clawback from previous 340B litigation to a three percent reduction.
• The transition of still more imaging services to site-neutral payments and a prohibition against Medicare outpatient payments for off-campus hospital-based outpatient departments unless each department has its own National Provider Identifier (NPI) and an attestation from the main provider confirming compliance with current provider-based requirements.
• Reduced Medicare payments for 340B-covered prescription drugs.
• The removal of more than 600 surgical procedures from Medicare’s inpatient-only list.

Learn more about what CMS has proposed from the Becker’s Hospital Review article “CMS targets 340B, site-neutral pay in 2027 outpatient rule — 9 things to know;” from this CMS news release; from this CMS fact sheet; and from the proposed rule itself.