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Home Health & Hospice Week

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Hospice Payment Rates To Increase 2.5% In October

Published on Tue Jul 05, 2011

Plus: Soon you'll need to make your hospice cap calculation decision. Unlike home health agencies, hospices will have a little more Medicare money to tackle their regulatory challenges in the coming year. Medicare will increase payment rates to hospices by 2.5 percent for the 2012 fiscal year starting Oct. 1, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services says in the hospice wage index final rule published in the Aug. 4 Federal Register. That's up slightly from the 2.3 percent increase CMS predicted in the proposed rule back in May (see Eli's HCW, Vol. XX, No. 17, p. 130). CMS arrives at the 2.5 percent mark by subtracting the 0.5 percent Budget Neutrality Adjustment Factor (BNAF) from the 3.0 percent inflation figure, CMS explains in a release. The BNAF cut is in the third year of its seven-year implementation. The reduction to the inflation update will strip an estimated $80 million [...]
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