Home Health & Hospice Week

Cut for case mix creep shoots up, thanks in large part to therapy utilization changes. Get ready to tighten your budget belt even further, if hundreds of millions of dollars worth of proposed cuts to your Medicare payment rates become final. In its proposed prospective payment system rule for home health agencies published in the July 23 Federal Register, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services sets out a 4.75 percent cut to Medicare payment rates for 2011. That would bring the current PPS base rate of $2,312.94 down to $2,198.58, and will cut about $900 million from Medicare HHA payments next year. Why? The 4.75 percent cut includes wage index changes and a legislatively mandated 1 percent cut to the market basket inflation update, making the MB increase only 1.4 percent. It also includes a 2.5 percent reduction due to outlier calculation changes. But most of the cut is [...]