Home Health & Hospice Week

Details remain fuzzy for the moment.

Whether you see higher or lower payment rates in 2023, 2024, and beyond may depend on legislation being hammered out in the nation’s capital in the last weeks of the year.

On Tues. Dec. 13, Senate Appropriations Chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said in a statement that negotiators had “reached a bipartisan, bicameral framework that should allow us to finish an omnibus appropriations bill that can pass the House and Senate and be signed into law by the president.” Leahy said he negotiated the deal with House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Senate Appropriations ranking member Richard Shelby (R-Ala.).

However, at press time, details of the agreement had not yet been released. Hospice agencies are anxious to see whether cuts floated by legislators, including a 20 percent cut to hospice aggregate per patient caps, are included.

Home health agencies are waiting to see if relief for Medicare’s forthcoming behavioral assumption adjustment

and other PDGM-related reductions made the cut. Both providers are hoping to see sequestration cuts deferred.