Statement on the FY 2024 Hospital Inpatient Prospective Payment System Final Rule

By Soumi Saha, Senior Vice President of Government Affairs, Premier

Premier is deeply disappointed in the hospital payment update finalized by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). A universal truth in our country is that rising healthcare costs coupled with labor shortages and an aging population demands payment policies that ensure hospitals can focus on providing high-quality, patient-centered care.

This inadequate update ensures that hospitals will instead focus on how they are going to keep their doors open. The chasm between a 3.1 percent payment update and reality, coupled with uncomfortably high inflation, is unsustainable and threatens the viability of the American healthcare system.

CMS can and must do better to adopt new or supplemental data sources to calculate the real costs hospitals incur moving forward, such as more accurately reflecting the cost of labor inclusive of contract labor.