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CMS to scrap healthcare regulations, says hospitals will save $1B
The federal Medicare agency said its move to eliminate a handful of regulations will save healthcare companies more than $1 billion next year.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced Tuesday that it will scrap certain rules for hospitals and similar facilities. The changes are in response to President Obama’s call for agencies to find and eliminate unnecessary regulations.
CMS Administrator Don Berwick said the agency is eliminating several specific requirements, such as a rule requiring multiple hospitals in the same system to have their own governing boards. By letting hospitals set their own management structures, he said, CMS will help them free up money for other priorities.
CMS also is eliminating rules that require rural hospitals to perform many tests in-house — they’ll now be allowed to outsource such work. Other changes will eliminate restrictions on the work that nurse practitioners and other non-physicians can do.
Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Health, said the changes don’t go far enough.
“We appreciate their actions in this area and attempts to reduce the regulatory burden,” Pitts said in a news release, “however, the thousands of pages of regulations that have come out with the healthcare law, and tens of thousands more on the way, undermine the administration’s efforts to reduce burdensome regulations. As we have said before, the best way to reduce costs, relieve regulatory burdens and create jobs is to repeal the healthcare law.”
Administration officials said earlier this year that regulations implemented with the healthcare law have been written to ensure they aren’t overly burdensome or duplicative, and therefore aren’t included in the search for unnecessary healthcare regulations.
