Hospice:
Put These Hospice Hot Spots On Your Radar
Published on Tue May 03, 2011
A hospice copayment proposal could rear its ugly head in 2011. Don't be surprised to see reimbursement cuts and skilled nursing facility-related scrutiny come your way this year, judging from a recent report to Congress. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission is advising Congress to cut back hospices' Medicare payment rate update for 2012 to just 1 percent. That compares to the currently proposed 2.3 percent payment hike from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (see Eli's HCW, Vol. XX, No. 17, p. 130). The cut would strip up to $250 million from Medicare's hospice spending next year. Why? MedPAC expects hospices to have an average Medicare profit margin of 4.2 percent in 2012, it says in its March report to Congress. And the industry has seen exponential growth in the last decade (see related box, p. 164). "The number of hospices has increased ... because of the entry of [...]