Home Health & Hospice Week

Provider payment cuts aren’t the only topics MedPAC is tackling.

In its March meeting, MedPAC contemplated reforming Medicare’s wage index systems. Among problems with the current systems is that “broad areas mask differences in labor costs within areas and create large differences across some adjacent areas,” according to the meeting presentation.

MedPAC staff suggested a number of ways to fix the problems, including capping “wage index cliffs between adjacent counties at 10 percent.”

Although the session focused on hospital and skilled nursing facility wage index issues, the National Association for Home Care & Hospice seems to find the discussion promising. NAHC “has had a longstanding policy position that Congress should mandate that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) implement a wage index model that provides home health and hospice agencies a level playing field with other health care entities, such as hospitals and SNFs, that employ the same types of workers,” the trade association says in its member newsletter.

“The Commission’s discussion … was positive, with strong support for elimination of existing exceptions in the wage index system,” NAHC adds.