Medicare was the primary payer for 90 percent of transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) hospitalizations over a recent three-year period, according to a March 19 report in JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions. With that in mind, the recent proposal to cut $473 billion from the CMS budget over the next decade could limit access to the increasingly popular procedure, researchers noted.

“Medicare beneficiaries may not be able to withstand anticipated cuts, and if cutting health care payments is inevitable, we need to make dedicated efforts to make sure life-saving procedures such as TAVRs are not affected,” wrote senior author Pankaj Arora, MD, with the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and colleagues. “We need to focus our efforts on customizing health care reforms by involving all the relevant stakeholders in the restructuring of Medicare.”

The researchers studied the National Inpatient Sample to identify all TAVR hospitalizations from 2012 to 2014 and propensity-matched those individuals to similar patients undergoing surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR) over the same period.