The Ambulatory Surgery Center Association (ASCA) has submitted comments to CMS on its proposed 2027 updates to the ASC payment system. ASCA stated its “support for provisions aimed at expanding the range of procedures performed in ASCs, but warned that declining reimbursement will prevent Medicare beneficiaries from fully benefiting from care in the lower-cost setting.”
Stated ASCA CEO Bill Prentice, “Adding more procedures to the ASC Covered Procedures List is a positive step, but a failure to address the urgent payment issues will trap patient volume in more expensive settings and needlessly increase costs for the Medicare program.”
Among the changes ASCA is advocating to the proposed 2027 ASC payment updates:
- ASCA recommends that CMS discontinue the ASC weight scalar, which it states is projected to cut payments for 85 of the top 100 ASC procedures by Medicare volume in 2027.
- ASCA supported CMS’ proposal to continue using the hospital market basket as the annual update mechanism for ASC payments, while urging the agency to make the policy permanent. ASCA cited recent research that it states shows that “using the same update factor for hospitals and ASCs has encouraged procedures to migrate to the lower-cost ASC environment and increased Medicare program savings.”
- ASCA urged CMS to extend existing hospital wage-index protections to ASCs. “Surgery centers face the same workforce challenges as hospitals but are not permitted to benefit from geographic reclassification policies or frontier-state wage-index floors,” stated ASCA. “Expanding those policies to ASCs would help rural facilities remain financially viable and improve access to outpatient surgical services in underserved communities.”
- ASCA asked CMS to grant ASCs the same permission as hospitals and physician offices to receive reimbursement for procedures billed under unlisted CPT codes. “Removing this restriction would expand access to innovative and emerging surgical procedures while better aligning payment policies across outpatient settings,” it stated.
- ASCA stated that it “supported removing measures from the ASC Quality Reporting Program that do not directly improve patient outcomes, and urged CMS to provide relief for facilities struggling to meet the mandated survey response thresholds for the Outpatient and Ambulatory Surgery Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems Survey measure. The association also requested that CMS delay implementation of the ASC-21 patient-reported outcomes measure, recommending that the agency first evaluate the measure’s effectiveness in the inpatient setting before requiring its implementation in ASCs.
Read ASCA’s full comment letter.
