Lawmakers and Advocates Speak Out Against Proposed Home Health Cuts

In June, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a draft regulation that proposes to deeply cut Medicare funding for home healthcare services. Cuts of this severity could threaten the delivery of quality skilled home health services for Medicare’s most vulnerable beneficiaries.

As home healthcare providers and patients wait to see whether the rule will be finalized in its current form, lawmakers and fellow advocates are standing up for home healthcare.

Bipartisan Representatives Doris Matsui (D-CA) and David McKinley (R-WV) recently spoke out against these cuts together in a joint op-ed published in Roll Call.  The lawmakers wrote:

“Home health care is a vital solution to improving patient health while also decreasing costs. Home health allows patients to receive low-cost care in the safety of their homes, which reduces Medicare expenditures in more expensive institutional care settings. That’s why we believe Medicare should support and encourage the delivery of home health care.

“We are concerned that a proposed rule issued by the Medicare agency will do just the opposite.”

More than 200 bipartisan members of Congress share their concerns and have called for reconsideration of this rule. AARP, the American Hospital Association, the Small Business Administration, and dozens of other stakeholder groups have also written to CMS asking for a more full analysis of the proposal to ensure patient access to care is not compromised.

Supporters of home healthcare understand that proposed cuts of this magnitude will threaten patient access to skilled home healthcare services. As one of the Medicare program’s most disadvantaged patient populations — many of whom live in underserved and rural communities — home health beneficiaries are uniquely vulnerable to patient access challenges as well as chronic disease and medical conditions that can benefit immensely from the delivery of home health.