Sen. Chuck Grassley has pressed the Obama Administration to address whether patient satisfaction surveys linked to Medicare payments encourage opioid pain reliever abuse, already a national epidemic. Grassley and Sen. Dianne Feinstein initially wrote to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services with this concern in June 2014. The Administration initially responded that it was unaware of a link. Grassley and fellow senators pushed further. The correspondence is available here. Today, the Administration is announcing a proposal to remove the survey pain management questions from the hospital payment scoring calculation. Grassley made the following comment on this reversal.
“It’s good news that the Obama Administration is recognizing this problem, but it’s frustrating that it took so long to reach this point. The Administration downplayed anecdotal evidence that some hospitals linked opioids to higher satisfaction scores and told us in effect to move along. Similarly, the Administration is now promoting and embracing drug take-back days that it once cancelled and reinstated only after congressional and public outcry. These are examples of bureaucratic hurdles’ getting in the way of common sense.”
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