CMS launches payment model addressing chronic disease

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced the launch of the Make America Healthy Again: Enhancing Lifestyle and Evaluating Value-based Approaches Through Evidence Model. The voluntary payment model will provide approximately $100 million to fund up to 30 chronic disease prevention and health promotion proposals for three years. Proposals must include evidence-based functional or lifestyle medicine interventions not covered for original Medicare beneficiaries. Under the model, CMS said it would evaluate necessary cost and quality data of such interventions to inform future decisions on the feasibility of including them in original Medicare. The agency will release a funding notice in early 2026 for the first cohort, which will begin Sept. 1, 2026. The second cohort will begin one year later.