CMS Ends MA VBID Model in 2025 – Cites Unmitigable Costs

The costs were also unprecedented for the CMS Innovation Center’s models, driven primarily due to risk score growth and prescription drug costs that could not be contained by policy modifications.

The costs are “substantial and unmitigable,” exceeding $2.3 billion in 2021 and $2.2 billion in 2022, according to the CMS Blog post on the program’s end.

The program was launched in 2017 and tested Medicare Advantage interventions while lowering Medicare spending and improving quality of care for MA beneficiaries. It also sought to increase transparency for the MA program with regards to beneficiary plan usage and supplemental benefits. In analyses of the model, the Innovation Center found that MA plans participating in VBID were associated with higher risk scores, but the increased scores associated with the VBID model were not isolated to subsets of the model.