CMS proposes Medicare payment adjustment for home health agencies

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Jun 29 2013

A proposed rule released Thursday would cause home health agencies to experience a 1.5 percent reduction in their Medicare payments for 2014, which the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services estimates could reduce payments to these facilities by $290 million next year.

CQ HealthBeat: Home Health Agency Payments Decline Under Medicare Proposal
Medicare payments to home health agencies in 2014 will fall by 1.5 percent, or $290 million below calendar 2013 levels, according to a proposed rule released late Thursday. The rule comes as home health agencies and other post-acute care providers have faced added scrutiny from the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission and members of Congress (Adams, 6/27).

Modern Healthcare: CMS Adjustments Plan Would Cut Medicare Pay Rates
A series of rebasing and coding adjustments from the CMS would cause home health agencies to see a 1.5% reduction in their Medicare payments for 2014, which the CMS estimates could lower total payments to these facilities by $290 million next year. In a proposed rule Thursday, the CMS said the decrease reflects a 2.4% home health payment update amounting to a $460 million increase in overall payments, combined with a host of adjustments that would decrease payments by $750 million (Zigmond, 6/27).

And on the Medicare politics front -

The Washington Post: 4 Pinocchios For The Latest 'Mediscare' Ad
The ad, like similar attacks last year, tries to give itself credibility by citing The Wall Street Journal, which has a conservative-leaning editorial page. But it is quoting from a 2011 news article about a House Republican plan for Medicare - and badly truncates the quote (Kessler, 6/28).

This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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I think Medicare needs to look at the larger picture

Paloma Homehealth says:

July 2, 2013 at 4:07 PM

I think Medicare needs to look at the larger picture. It is being penny wise and pound foolish. Home Health Care has been demonstrated over and over again to save patient lives and money in the long term.
There is a huge influx of aging baby boomers coming down the pipeline, and any knee jerk reaction to save a few dollars in the short term will have profound unintended but disastrous consequences in the future. After gutting the capacity of existing providers and muddling the processes involved, what we will end up with is fewer providers, but a boom in the number of patients, who will be utilizing hospital emergency rooms at significantly higher rates than present because of the glut in providers.
What Medicare needs to do right now is to streamline home health care, by fortifying the existing providers and rewarding them for good out comes, instead of punishing existing providers. The current relationship model that Medicare has developed with home health providers is adversarial. Healthcare has been criminalized in the Unites States, and all providers are considered criminals until proven innocent, often by following very complicated rules meant to trap providers into breaking them. Until Medicare stops seeing home health care as a problem, rather than as a solution to a problem that is only beginning to creep up, we will continue to see conflicting laws and rules that do not make any sense.
The objective is to save lives and money down the road, but the path Medicare or the government has chosen at present is extremely short sighted, because it is intended to destroy home health care as an industry altogether.

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