Home Health & Hospice Week

Influential advisory body to Congress also focuses on home infusion.You'll have to deal with copayments for home health services, if the Medicare Payment Ad-visory Commission gets its way.Like a dog with a bone, MedPAC raises the idea of home health copayments once again in its new report to Congress, "Medicare and the Health Care Delivery System." The Commission urges lawmakers to undertake an overhaul of beneficiary cost-sharing to reform Medicare's benefit design.In its budget-neutral proposal, MedPAC wants Congress to realign beneficiary incentives to reduce unnecessary utilization. One suggestion to do so is to establish copayments for different types of services.Under the plan, Medicare would have discretion to set the copays. But MedPAC clearly expects home health to be subject to one -- in a benefit package example, the Commission offers the $150 per episode copay it's been proposing.Would Home Care Value Outweigh Copays?Other features of the proposal would include a [...]