President Joe Biden’s administration moved to slash Medicare payments for home health agencies on Friday, a move opposed by both Republicans and Democrats.
President Joe Biden speaks about his administration’s plans to protect Social Security and Medicare and lower healthcare costs, Feb. 9, 2023, at the University of Tampa in Tampa, Fla. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed a rule that would reduce Medicare payments by 2.2 percent, or $375 million in 2024. The proposed cut means that home health agencies would have to take a 5.1 decrease of $870 million based on the assumption that the agencies altered their billing and coding activity to “maximize reimbursements in 2020 and 2021.”
Bloomberg noted that home health agencies provide care for patients in the care and convenience of the client’s home, especially for America’s seniors. Seniors usually prefer home health agencies over nursing home care.
In 2021, traditional Medicare spent $16.9 billion for home health services on behalf of about three million beneficiaries, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission reported. Nearly 11,500 home health agencies participated in the Medicare program that year.
The Partnership for Quality Home Healthcare said that the cuts would exceed $18 billion over the next ten years and comes at a time when the industry faces rising costs and a lack of skilled nurses and patients.
CMS has made these cuts assuming it had made $2.1 billion in alleged overpayments. However, the Partnership said that CMS is using a flawed methodology to assess past overpayments.
Joanne Cunningham, the CEO of the Partnership, said in a statement:
The Partnership has repeatedly expressed concerns with CMS’ actions aimed at cutting Medicare home health reimbursement, primarily because of the serious impacts on access to the home-based care that patients and families overwhelmingly prefer. The home health provider community is gravely concerned that CMS’s proposed actions for 2024 will only continue to degrade beneficiary access to home healthcare services.
William Dombi, president of the National Association for Home Care & Hospice, said in a statement, “We now turn to Congress to correct what CMS has done and prevent the impending harm to the millions of highly vulnerable home health patients that depend and will depend in the future on this essential Medicare benefit.”
He noted that Sens. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and Susan Collins (R-ME) proposed legislation, S. 2137, that would prevent these Medicare rate cuts for home health agencies.