News Briefs: CMS Projects Average Rate Increase of 1.03% for MA Plans in 2024

CMS in its 2024 Advance Notice projected that Medicare Advantage organizations can expect an average estimated change in revenue of 1.03%, when taking into account an average increase in risk scores of 3.3%. Even though analysts expected that rate to fall well below the robust 8% CMS predicted in its preliminary rate notice for 2023, they characterized it as low when excluding the risk scoring trend. The 2024 projection is also based on an effective growth rate of 2.09%, which CMS this time last year estimated would be 4.75%. Additionally, CMS will continue to apply the statutory minimum coding intensity adjustment of 5.9% to offset the effects of higher levels of coding intensity in MA relative to fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare. That coding intensity adjustment generated much discussion in comment letters on the Advance Notice last year. When asked during a Feb. 1 call with reporters why CMS again opted for the minimum adjustment, CMS Deputy Administrator and Center for Medicare Director Meena Seshamani, M.D., Ph.D., told AIS Health: “We continue to analyze and evaluate MA coding patterns, and 5.9% we feel is adequate at this time, and we continue to look at coding pattern differences, how we set that pattern adjustment [and] how that’s applied…in future years as well.” The preliminary rate notice also included technical updates to the risk adjustment model, including a reliance on condition categories from the ICD-10 classification system (instead of the ICD-9 system) and a shift to more recent underlying FFS data years to reflect 2018 diagnoses and 2019 expenditures.

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