The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) has added five new members, including a former head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and chief medical officers at HCA Healthcare and Geisinger Health System.
Members were appointed by the Government Accountability Office for three-year terms expiring in April 2021.
“MedPAC provides valuable insight and advice to Congress on myriad Medicare issues,” said Gene Dodaro, U.S. Comptroller General and head of the GAO. “I was heartened by the number of highly-qualified applicants who expressed interest in joining the Commission, and am pleased to announce these latest appointments.”
The five new members are:
- Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc, the former head of ONC from 2014 to 2016. She’s currently a professor of medicine and population health at the University of Texas’s Dell Medical School.
- Marjorie Ginsburg, MPH, founded the Center for Healthcare Decisions and ran it from 1994 until 2016, before it was merged into healthcare policy and research center at the University of California, Davis.
- Jonathan Jaffrey, MD, MS, MMM, is a professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin, as well as UW Health’s chief population health officer and president of CEO of UW Health ACO.
- Jonathan Perlin, MD, PhD, MSHA, serves as president of clinical services and CMO at HCA Healthcare. Before joining HCA, he was Under Secretary of health for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and CEO of the Veterans Health Administration. He also served as chairman of the American Hospital Association in 2015.
- Jaewon Ryu, MD, is executive vice president and CMO for Danville, Pennsylvania-based Geisinger. Previous roles include president of integrated care delivery at Humana and executive positions at the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System and Kaiser Permanente.
The GAO also reappointed one member to another three-year term: Susan Thompson, senior vice president of integration and optimization at UnityPoint Health in West Des Moines, Iowa.
MedPAC advises Congress on major Medicare policy issues. While its recommendations carry no binding authority, their suggestions do attract plenty of attention from the healthcare industry.
A recent example was the commission’s vote to recommend Congress repeal the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS). Its report said the program “impedes the movement towards high-value care” and recommended replacing it with a model that pushes providers to assume financial risk more quickly.
John joined TriMed in 2016, focusing on healthcare policy and regulation. After graduating from Columbia College Chicago, he worked at FM News Chicago and Rivet News Radio, and worked on the state government and politics beat for the Illinois Radio Network. Outside of work, you may find him adding to his never-ending graphic novel collection.