Budget:
MedPAC Cuts Would Put Majority Of HHAs In The Red
Published on Fri Jan 16, 2009
Industry fights back against proposed reductions Industry representatives were quick to discredit the Medicare Payment Advisory Commis-sion's forthcoming recommendations and the analysis that underlies them. "These recommendations will devastate home health care with over half of the agencies ending up in the red," says Val Halamandaris with the National Association for Home Care & Hospice. The average Medicare margins for Visiting Nurse Association of America members will slip to a loss in 2010 if the MedPAC recommendation is adopted by Congress, VNAA agrees in a statement. Some states would have more than 70 percent of agencies with negative margins under the cuts, NAHC points out. "If the crude instrument of across-the-board cuts continues to be used to restrain profitability in the PPS system, the result will be the gutting of the Medicare home health benefit," adds VNAA's Bob Wardwell, who was the architect of PPS when he was at CMS. [...]
