Eli's Hospice Insider

Hospice isn’t getting left behind, at least according to the latest figures from an influential advisory body to Congress.

From 2010 to 2019, hospice spending remained steady at 3 percent of Medicare outlays. That compares to home health spending, which made up 4 percent of Medicare’s $517 billion in spending in 2010 but only 2 percent of Medicare’s $787 billion in spending in 2019, the Medicare Payment Advisory Committee shows in its 2021 Medicare spending data book.

Another big change: “Spending on managed care plans has grown from 22 percent of Medicare spending in 2010 to 34 percent in 2019,” MedPAC highlights in the data book. “This growth is largely because the number of beneficiaries enrolled in Medicare Advantage nearly doubled over this period” while “the number of beneficiaries in fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare has stayed relatively flat,” it says.

See the data book at http://medpac.gov/docs/default-source/data-book/july2021_medpac_databook_sec.pdf.