Home Health & Hospice Week

Providers want rebasing year moved to 2011.The feds are gearing up for PPS rebasing, but home care providers don't like the machinery of the methodology.Background: The Affordable Care Act requires home health prospective payment system rebasing starting in 2014. Groups such as the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission have advocated starting the rebasing process, which will presumably lower payment rates, even sooner. One reason rates are expected to drop is because visit utilization has decreased significantly since PPS began in 2000.In the 2013 home health PPS proposed rule, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services wants "to rebase and revise the home health market basket to reflect CY 2010 Medicare cost report (MCR) data, the latest available and most complete data on the actual structure of HHA costs."Commenters on the rule are not fond of that idea. "Any rebasing of home health services should be based on 2011 cost reports," says [...]