Home Health & Hospice Week

Mandate hurts agencies struggling to comply.

Now that the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 is law, you need to start thinking about how to prepare for the surety bond requirements it contains.

Recap: Congress passed the so-called doc fix bill (see Eli’s HCW, Vol. XXIV, No. 14) and President Obama signed it into law April 16. The legislation contains a 2018 payment update reduction for both HHAs and hospices, as well as a $50,000 surety bond requirement for HHAs. The payment update will be limited to 1 percent in 2018, and the surety bond will have a minimum $50,000 amount — and the amount will increase corresponding to an agen-cy’s revenues.

The bill also extends rural add-ons, praised Val Halamandaris with the National Association for Home Care & Hospice.

NAHC will “continue looking for opportunities to repeal” the bond provision, he pledged in a statement. The requirement “would further hurt pro-viders currently struggling to comply with expensive regulations; it would threaten access to care especially in rural areas; it is effectively a tax on the vast majority of providers to cover the cost of a few bad actors; [and] it provides too much discretion to CMS in setting the bond amount and implementing the requirement.”

Plus: “Any surety bond requirement should be time-limited and targeted to new providers only,” Halamandaris said. “Longstanding providers rarely present a risk to Medicare.