Home Health & Hospice Week

Don’t be surprised if and when lawmakers start looking anew for places to cut the Medicare budget.

Why? “Average annual expenditure growth of 7.5 percent is projected for Medicare over 2022-2031,” says the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Office of the Actuary.

They may opt to hold onto one of their favorite rate-cutting mechanisms, the sequestration reduction of 2 percent. “In 2022, the combination of fee-for-service beneficiaries utilizing emergent hospital care at lower rates and the reinstatement of payment rate cuts associated with the Medicare Sequester Relief Act of 2022 resulted in slower Medicare spending growth of 4.8 percent (down from 8.4 percent in 2021),” CMS notes.

“Sequestration may never end,” warns consulting and accounting firm The Health Group in its electronic newsletter. Hospice and home health agencies, “like other healthcare providers, are being penalized at the rate of 2 percent of Medicare payments due to the inability of Congress to reduce government spending by $1.5 trillion over 10 years in 2011,” The Health Group recounts.

“It has now been 10 years, excluding the COVID-19 [public health emergency] period, that hospices, and other healthcare providers, have had their payments confiscated,” The Health Group highlights. “The sequestration was originally scheduled to end in 2021 but is currently extended to 2032.”

Bottom line: “The extension of sequestration continues to be an easy means for Congress to reduce expenditures with little, if any political consequence,” The Health Group criticizes.