Home Health & Hospice Week

Home health agencies should be able to take rebasing reductions to Medicare reimbursement in stride, suggests a recent Medicare Payment Advisory Commission report.

Say what? The Affordable Care Act which required four years of rebasing reductions to home health payments also mandated that MedPAC assess the impact of the payment changes on quality of and beneficiary access to home health care. In its new report, MedPAC predicts that not only will the pay cuts not be harmful, but HHAs will continue to rack up profits under the reductions.

“This mandated report is due before claims or quality data will be available to allow us to directly assess the impact of rebasing,” MedPAC admits. But “experience suggests that the small PPACA rebasing reductions will not change average episode payments significantly,” the commission says. “Home health agency margins are likely to remain high under the current rebasing policy, and quality of care and beneficiary access to care are unlikely to be negatively affected.”

The report is at http://medpac.gov/documents/reports/dec14_homehealth_rebasing_report.pdf.