As a family-owned and operated Home Health and Hospice Home Care provider, Well Care Health currently cares for a patient census of over 4,000 patients. We have submitted detailed Comments to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) expressing concerns about the CY 2025 Home Health PPS Proposed Rule, which if finalized would risk significant impacts to our continued ability to serve patients in need of home health services.
With a 37-year history in home-based care and over 23 years as a Medicare-participating provider, Well Care is well-positioned to offer vital insights to the CMS. Through our comments, we aim to shed light on the potential negative effects of the Proposed Rule on the patients and communities we serve across the Carolinas.
The home health benefit is a vital component of the healthcare continuum by directly addressing patient care needs through services like nursing and therapy in a low-cost care setting where patients overwhelmingly prefer to receive care. Home health also directly drives value-based outcomes by avoiding unnecessary utilization of costly institutional care settings such as skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) and hospital readmissions. Without adequate access to home health services, patients would alternatively be subjected to longer hospital length of stays, elevated hospital readmission rates, increased SNF utilization, and foregone needed care. For these reasons, home health serves as an instrumental value-based care driver for the Medicare program and other payers.
Specifically, Well Care’s comments highlight the following points for CMS to consider:
- The Proposed Rule’s substantial reimbursement cuts are disconnected from the reality of delivering home health services in the current operating environment.
- Significant continued shifts in wage index values contribute to the destabilization of the home health benefit.
- The Proposed Rule threatens to reduce much-needed access to home health services, especially for rural communities and higher-acuity patients.
- The Proposed Rule’s payment cuts would foreseeably have the counter-productive and negative impact of increasing overall Medicare program expenditures.
- The Proposed Rule suffers from several notable flaws in its methodology.
- Well Care has multiple areas of feedback in relation to the Proposed Rule’s updates to the Home Health Value Based Purchasing (HHVBP) and Quality Reporting (HHQRP) programs.
Alongside these Comments and Well Care’s other advocacy efforts, we invite others to share their perspective and make their voices heard on these important issues facing the Home Health benefit.
