The Medicare Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) was established by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 and went into effect on August 1, 2000. The OPPS was an attempt to simplify and reduce Medicare payments for hospital outpatient services by creating a new fee schedule. In a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Changes in Health Care Financing and Organization (HCFO) program-funded study, Daifeng He, Ph.D., and Jennifer Mellor, Ph.D., studied the effects of the OPPS on how much outpatient care is provided by Florida hospitals and who pays for it. The results of the study were published in the September 2012 issue of the Journal of Health Economics.
