Home Health & Hospice Week

Will hospitals control HHA payments some day?The results aren't yet in from demonstration projects that Medicare is running on bundling of post-acute services, but that isn't stopping the Medi-care Payment Advisory Commission from forming opinions on the payment methodology.Background: Numerous law- and policy-makers including President Obama have promoted the idea of bundling Medicare payments for post-acute care providers in hopes of gaining efficiencies and coordinating care between settings. And last year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Ser-vices put out a request for application (RFA) for the first phase of its Bundled Payments for Care Improvement demonstration project, as required by the Affordable Care Act (see Eli's HCW, Vol. XX, No. 31, p. 244). Under that initiative, CMS will test varying payment bundling methodologies that would group post-acute care provider payments together with hospital payments, and keep post-acute providers' pay bundled only with other post-acute care providers.In its Sept. 6 [...]