Home Health & Hospice Week

Payment commission paints industry with broad fraud brush. If an influential advisory body to Congress has any say, your patients will be subject to $150 copayments starting next year. That's the recommendation approved by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission in its Jan. 13 meeting in Washington, D.C. The vote followed intense discussion of the proposal in MedPAC's December meeting (see Eli's HCW, Vol. XX, No. 2, p. 10). The copayment that MedPAC will endorse in its March report to Congress would apply per episode, but only to those episodes that don't follow a hospital or post-acute stay. The copay also would not apply to low-utilization payment adjustment (LUPA) episodes of four visits or less. That means the copay, which MedPAC will suggest be set at $150, would apply to about onethird of Medicare's home health episodes, noted MedPAC staffer Evan Christman in the meeting. The $150 figure, which was scaled [...]