Home Health & Hospice Week

One moratorium area has twice as many agencies per bene.

Home health agencies’ own claims data is what is hanging them in moratorium areas. These are the 2012 stats the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services used to help determine whether and where to impose a moratorium on new enrollment for HHAs, it says in a Feb. 4 Federal Register notice:

• In Ft.   Lauderdale, the ratio of HHAs to Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries was 92 percent higher in 2012 than in "comparison counties" (all counties across the nation with 200,000 or more benes, excluding the county at issue and other high-utilization counties).

• In Dallas, the ratio of HHAs to FFS benes was 365 percent higher than in comparison counties.

• In Houston, the ratio of HHAs to benes was 276 percent higher than in comparison counties.

• In Detroit, the ratio of HHAs to benes was 276 percent higher than in comparison counties.

• In Florida, Medicaid paid Ft. Lauderdale HHAs 95 percent more per year than other agencies in the state for 2011. That figure was 24 percent more in Detroit, 83 percent more per user in Houston, and 35 percent more per user in Dallas.

• Ft. Lauderdale agencies received payments of $6,432 per average Medicare home health user per year, compared to $5,387 in comparison counties —19 percent greater.

• Broward had the sixth highest payments to HHAs, behind locations all also subject to the moratoria.

• Dallas County agencies received payments of $7,336 per average home health user per year, compared to $5,312 in comparison counties — 38 percent higher. "Only payments in the counties of Miami-Dade, FL and Harris, TX ... were higher in 2012," CMS notes in the notice.

• HHAs in Harris County, Texas (which  contains  Houston) received payments of $7,631 per average home health user per year, compared to $5,253 in the comparison counties — 45 percent higher than the comparison counties, "second only to Miami-Dade," CMS notes.