MedPAC tables five draft PPS recommendations at HH meeting
MedPAC tables five draft PPS recommendations at HH meeting
By MATTHEW HAY
HHBR Washington Correspondent
WASHINGTON The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) tabled five draft recommendations for home health at its Jan. 13 meeting, including implementation of the Health Care Financing Administration’s (HCFA; Baltimore) prospective payment system (PPS) on Oct. 1, 2000. In its recommendation to Congress last month, MedPAC opted not to recommend a transition to PPS, despite misgivings voiced by several commission members at its most recent meeting.
MedPAC’s other draft recommendations included the following:
• The secretary of Health and Human Services should vigorously monitor home health agency behavior under the 60-day episode PPS.
• Congress should require HCFA to establish a prospective payment for home health goods and services that blends fixed episode payments and per-visit payments.
• The secretary should refine the home health PPS case-mix adjustment prior to its implementation and use routine data collection to update the case-mix weights over time.
• The secretary should use a home health agency wage index to adjust the PPS rates for local wages
While the draft recommendations were broad in nature, the commission raised a host of potential concerns. For example, Commissioner Peter Kemper questioned whether using charges to update the system is feasible and whether charge data accurately reflect intensity of service use. n
Look for a complete examination of these and other issues in next week’s HHBR
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