Home Health & Hospice Week

MedPAC’s June report to Congress may not have home health- or hospice-specific chapters like its March one, but it could still significantly influence agencies’ futures.

For example: Chapters on reforming Medicare’s wage index system and a post-acute care prospective payment system could lead to big changes.

“The Congress should repeal the existing Medicare wage index statutes, including current exceptions, and require the Secretary to phase in new Medicare wage index systems for hospitals and other types of providers,” the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission recommends in the report. The new systems should “use all-employer, occupation-level wage data with different occupation weights for the wage index of each provider type; reflect local area level differences in wages between and within metropolitan statistical areas and statewide rural areas; and smooth wage index differences across adjacent local areas,” MedPAC says.

And “a PAC PPS is feasible using existing data and would establish reasonably accurate payments,” MedPAC finds. It “would redistribute payments across providers,” the advisory body to Congress adds.

However, “an adjuster for home health stays would be needed to guard against overpayments for HHA stays and underpayments for institutional PAC stays,” according to the report.

The 503-page report is at www.medpac.gov/wp-content/ uploads/2023/06/Jun23_MedPAC_Report_To_Congress_ SEC.pdf.