The Senate Finance Committee is using an effort to help Americans with health problems to mend fences between Democrats and Republicans.
The committee is trying to use an open, genuinely bipartisan process to draft S. 870, the Creating High-Quality Results and Outcomes Necessary to Improve Chronic Care Act of 2017 bill, or CHRONIC Care Act bill.
Drafters hope to come up with a package of inexpensive tweaks that will make Medicare friendlier to enrollees who are living with chronic health problems.
The Senate Finance Committee held a hearing on the CHRONIC Care Act bill project Tuesday, and it has scheduled another project session for Thursday.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the committee chairman, has developed a version of the bill that includes one provision that could let Medicare Advantage plans tiptoe into offering home care benefits.
The tweak would let a Medicare Advantage plan offer new types of supplemental benefits aimed at improving the health or function of chronically ill enrollees. The supplemental benefits would not necessarily have to be health benefits.
Some other provisions in the Hatch draft would affect Medicare accountable care organizations.
An accountable care organization is a group of providers that agrees to work together to coordinate care for a patient and share some of the financial risk involved with providing and coordinating the patient's care.
