NEWS BRIEFS
NEWS BRIEFS
Congress passes budget blueprints
Rejecting President Clinton’s proposed Medicare funding plan, Congress voted to "lock away" the projected $1.8 trillion surplus funds generated by Medicare and Social Security tax collections until as such time that a major Medicare restructuring bill is passed.
Clinton had tried to push through his plan of putting $700 billion in surplus funds into the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund over the next 15 years. Instead, the Senate voted 55-44 in favor of the Republican’s blueprint, which would finance reform proposals such as the ones proposed by (but never formally approved) the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare. The House followed suit with a vote of 221-208 in favor of the GOP plan and rejecting three Democrat-sponsored programs.
Health care providers have come down in favor of the Republican plan which, unlike the president’s, does not include reducing provider payments by $9 billion over the next five years.
House, Senate push for home care reform
In the face of growing evidence that home care is at risk, the budget committees of both the House and Senate have approved budget resolutions designed to double the amount of Medicare payments over the coming decade.
The House voted unanimously to approve an amendment sponsored by Reps. Robert Weygand (D-RI), Ernest Fletcher (R-KY), and Paul Ryun (R-KS) to ask Congress to avoid implementation of the 15% reduction under the interim payment system (IPS) and instead opt for a timely implementation of a prospective payment system.
The Senate, meanwhile, passed an amendment sponsored by Sens. Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Russell Feingold (D-WI) that cites the IPS and other Medicare benefit changes as exacerbating "inequalities in payments for home health services between regions, limiting access to those services in many areas and penalizing efficient, low-cost providers."
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