House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) and Ranking Member Sandy Levin (D-Mich.), along with Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Ranking Member Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), have released a discussion draft of a bill that aims to modernize Medicare post-acute care payments.
The Improving Medicare Post-Acute Care Transformation Act of 2014 was informed by suggestions on how to strengthen post-acute care from more than 70 stakeholders in the healthcare community, according to a news release. Post-acute care services include those administered at long-term care hospitals, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, skilled nursing facilities and home health agencies.
The bill would require post-acute care providers to report standardized assessment data for the purposes of payment reform, patient assessment, quality comparisons and resource use measurement. HHS and the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission would be required to report to Congress on how the assessment data could be used to reform post-acute care provider payments through site-neutral reimbursement, bundled payments or another reform model.
"Without comparable information across PAC settings, policymakers and providers cannot determine whether patients treated and the care provided in different settings is, in fact, the same or whether one PAC setting is more appropriate," the release for the bill states. "Absent this information, it is difficult to move forward with PAC payment reforms."
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