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The new proposed rules are being cheered by caregivers and are in response to complaints from patients and providers that the PA process is often burdensome, disruptive to care, delaying care, costly, and a major source of frustration and burnout for providers.

Many prior studies associated enrollment in Medicare Advantage with lower use of health care services, greater performance of recommended preventive services, and higher scores for some measures of patient experience. This and other studies over the last decade suggest that “the association between Medicare Advantage and higher quality of care is modest at best.”

Medicare cuts will complicate the lives and precarious health circumstances of the millions of Americans who depend on it while undermining the quality of care for numerous diseases. As a result, the 4.5% reduction to therapy providers under the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule in 2023 is causing great worry among seniors and healthcare professionals countrywide. The physical and occupational therapy professions would see reductions of about 9% by 2024 if this cut were to go into effect.

Not surprisingly, given the rate at which new FDA approvals are granted, the majority of clinicians prescribed a newly FDA-approved drug in the previous year, with 20% prescribing at least ten new drugs, according to OBRs Oncology Drug Report 2022. The latter metric demonstrates how quickly the world of cancer care is evolving, which has a number of important implications for oncology practice.

According to a survey conducted by the Association for Clinical Oncology, the majority of respondents (96%) said prior authorization has led to delays in cancer treatment, with 80% claiming prior authorization has enabled disease progression, and 36% of them saying prior authorization has led to patient deaths. 300 ASCO members who work in academic or university (29%) settings, private practice (34%), or community or hospital-based health network/systems (35%), completed the survey.

Around 82% of residency programs in the US subsist on federal funding. The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 capped the number of federally funded residency spots at 100,000 and the only adjustment since then has been a 1% increase. At least eight bills to address the issue have been put forward in Congress but none have passed.