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Nursing-home companies entering insurance business

July 13, 2017by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged , , , , , , , ,

By JORDAN RAU

For Kaiser Health News

Around the country, a handful of nursing-home companies have begun selling their own private Medicare insurance policies, pledging close coordination and promising to give clinicians more authority to decide what treatments they will cover for each patient.

These plans are recent additions to the Medicare Advantage market, where private plans have become an increasingly popular alternative to traditional fee-for-service coverage. Unlike other plans, these policies offered by long-term care companies often place a nurse in the skilled-nursing facility or retirement village, where they can talk directly to staff and assess patients’ conditions. Some provide primary-care doctors and nurses to residents in the homes or in affiliated assisted living facilities or retirement villages with the aim of staving off hospitalizations.

“The traditional model is making decisions based on paper, and in our model, these decisions are being made by clinicians who are really talking to the staff and seeing the patient,” said Angie Tolbert, a vice president of quality at PruittHealth, which began offering its plan to residents in 10 of its nursing homes in Georgia last year. “It’s a big shift in mindset.”).

Not everyone finds such plans superior. Some patients who are in disputes with the insurers have faulted the nursing home staff — who work for the same company — for not helping challenge decisions about coverage. They complain that the company holds an unfair advantage over Medicare beneficiaries.

“There’s a conflict there,” said Toby Edelman, a senior attorney with the Center for Medicare Advocacy.

In an Erickson Living retirement village in Silver Spring, Md., Faith Daiak signed up for an Erickson Advantage plan sold by a nurse whose office was in the main village building, according to her son, J.J. Daiak. After a bout with the flu last February weakened her enough to need a 10-day hospitalization, she was sent to her village’s skilled-nursing facility. There, the insurer repeatedly tried to cut short her stay.

Erickson Advantage first said it would stop paying for Daiak, 88, because she wasn’t getting healthier in the nursing facility. Her son appealed by pointing out that Medicare explicitly said as part of the 2014 settlement of a class-action lawsuit that patients do not have to be improving to qualify for skilled-nursing care.

Daiak’s appeal was denied, but the issue was sidelined in March when her rapid weight loss in the nursing home sent her back to the hospital, he said.

After Daiak returned to the nursing home with a feeding tube in her stomach, the insurer again tried to curtail her time there, saying she did not need that level of care. The family successfully appealed that decision after noting that Medicare’s manual said feeding-tube maintenance required the skilled care of a nursing facility.

In April, Erickson Advantage again said it would not continue paying for Daiak’s stay. It reversed that decision after Kaiser Health News asked the company about the case, J.J. Daiak said. He said the plan did not explain its turnaround.

Dolphine Williams (left) and Rita Coopersmith visit Faith Daiak in the Riderwood-ArborRidge Skilled Nursing Facility in Silver Spring, Md., on May 12, 2017. (Courtesy of the Daiak family)

While this Medicare Advantage plan touts its “team that knows you personally and wants to help,” J.J. Daiak said he found the registered nurse at Erickson’s Silver Spring community not helpful. “All I see is her trying to get Erickson out of having to pay for the nursing home,” he said. He subsequently switched his mother to traditional Medicare coverage with a supplemental Medigap policy, which she had until this year.

Erickson Living, the parent company of the nursing home and insurer, declined to discuss individual cases but noted that Medicare has given its insurance plans the best quality rating of five stars. In a written statement, the company said that “medical service determinations for Erickson Advantage members are based on reviews by licensed clinical staff and clinical guideline criteria. Our primary focus is always on ensuring that the healthcare being provided for our residents matches a patient’s needs and established clinical treatment protocols.”

Edelman said the dispute was particularly troubling because Erickson’s retirement villages are marketed on the promise that the company will care for seniors in all stages of aging. “They don’t tell you what they won’t pay for,” she said.

Popular Alternative

There are nearly 18 million enrollees in the overall Medicare Advantage market. Medicare pays private insurers a set amount to care for each beneficiary. In theory, this payment method gives the insurers motivation to keep patients from needing costly medical services such as hospitalizations.

A subset of Medicare Advantage plans are designed exclusively for people who either require or are expected to require at least 90 days of skilled services from nursing homes, assisted living facilities or other long-term care institutions. UnitedHealthcare directly offers three-quarters of these plans with about 40,000 enrollees, far more than those offered by nursing-home companies. Matthew Burns, a UnitedHealth spokesman, said the majority of the company’s plans are rated four stars or better on Medicare’s five-star quality scale.

“Our plans offer members quality and peace of mind — and they are considered above average to excellent by CMS quality and performance standards,” he said in a statement.

United also underwrites Erickson’s policies, which have around 200 enrollees, and were the first Advantage plans offered by a long-term care operator. Under the arrangement, Erickson Advantage decides when a nursing home stay is covered.

Nick Williams, PruittHealth’s care integration officer, said its Medicare insurance plan has resulted in 30 percent fewer hospitalizations among residents since it began last year. The company intends to expand the insurance coverage to residents at 42 of its other nursing homes in Georgia. Other nursing-home chains are experimenting with this model in Missouri, South Carolina, Virginia and elsewhere.

Anne Tumlinson, a Washington healthcare industry consultant who specializes in long-term care, said that when a nursing home’s company is on the hook for the cost of hospitalizations of their patients, it is more likely to make efforts to prevent them.

“It gets them out of hospitalizing people at the drop of the hat,” she said. “If you live in a nursing home or are living in assisted living and they have one of these plans going, they’re going to be investing heavily in 24/7 access to primary care.”

She said big insurers have so many different types of enrollees that they are less focused on the particular needs of nursing-home patients. “They’re too big, they’re bureaucratic, and they are insurers, not providers,” she said.

The Costs Patients Face

In Hingham, Mass., Suzanne Carmick has been frustrated with the Erickson plan’s unwillingness to pay for most of her mother’s prolonged stay. Last October, 98-year-old Lorraine Carmick went into Erickson’s nursing home after a hospitalization. Eleven days later, Erickson Advantage notified Suzanne Carmick it would stop paying for the facility because it said her mother was strong enough to move with the help of a rolling walker. Under Medicare’s rules, nursing home stays are not covered if a patient does not need daily physical therapy. Erickson said two or three days was sufficient for Carmick.

Suzanne Carmick appealed the decision, saying Erickson exaggerated her mother’s recovery, noting that she had dementia, an infection and was wearing two stiff leg braces. She said getting therapy five days a week provided in the nursing home would help her mother recover faster.

“She still cannot stand up or sit down or go anywhere … without an aide helping her by pulling her up or setting her in a chair,” Carmick wrote. “She is improving but is now supposed to stop or decrease PT [physical therapy], and she must start paying out-of-pocket?”

After a week’s extension, the nursing home began billing her mother at its daily rate of $463, which rose to $483 this year as Lorraine Carmick remained in the nursing home. A Medicare appeals judge subsequently ruled Erickson’s action was justified, based on the testimony from the nursing-home staff — all Erickson employees. If the insurer had covered a maximum stay, Carmick would have avoided more than $30,000 in bills she now owes. Suzanne Carmick said her mother has been on a wait list for six months for a bed on a less expensive floor in the nursing facility.

“It is a closed system where the skilled-nursing facility, physicians and Medicare Advantage plan are all one and the same,” she said. “The Erickson Advantage plan is turning out to be quite a disadvantage at this point.”

 

Medicare Advantage doesn’t look all that good to some sicker seniors

July 6, 2017by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

By FRED SCHULTE

For Kaiser Health News

When Sol Shipotow enrolled in a new Medicare Advantage health plan earlier this year, he expected to keep the doctor who treats his serious eye condition.

“That turned out not to be so,” said Shipotow, 83, who lives in Bensalem, Pa.

Shipotow said he had to scramble to get back on a health plan he could afford and that his longtime eye specialist would accept. “You have to really understand your policy,” he said. “I thought it was the same coverage.”

Boosters say that privately run Medicare Advantage plans, which enroll about one-third of all people eligible for Medicare, offer good value. They strive to keep patients healthy by coordinating their medical care through cost-conscious networks of doctors and hospitals.

But some critics argue the plans can prove risky for seniors in poor or declining health, or those like Shipotow who need to see specialists, because they often face hurdles getting access.ils).

A recent report by the Government Accountability Office, the auditing arm of Congress, adds new weight to criticisms that some health plans may leave sicker patients worse off.

The GAO report, released this spring, reviewed 126 Medicare Advantage plans and found that 35 of them had disproportionately high numbers of sicker people dropping out. Patients cited difficulty with access to “preferred doctors and hospitals” or other medical care, as the leading reasons for leaving.

“People who are sicker are much more likely to leave (Medicare Advantage plans) than people who are healthier,” James Cosgrove, director of the GAO’s health care analysis, said in explaining the research.

David Lipschutz, an attorney at the Center for Medicare Advocacy, says the GAO findings were alarming and should prompt tighter government oversight.

“A Medicare Advantage plan sponsor does not have an evergreen right to participate in and profit from the Medicare program, particularly if it is providing poor care,” Lipschutz says.

The GAO did not name the 35 health plans, though it urged federal health officials to consider a large exodus from a plan as a possible sign of substandard care. Most of the 35 health plans were relatively small, with 15,000 members or fewer, and had received poor scores on other government quality measures, the report said. Two dozen plans saw 1 in 5 patients leave in 2014, much higher turnover than normal, the GAO found.

Medicare Advantage plans now treat more than 19 million patients, and are expected to grow as record numbers of baby boomers reach retirement age.

Kristine Grow, a spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade group, says Medicare Advantage keeps expanding because most people who sign up are satisfied with the care they receive.

She says that patients in the GAO study mostly switched from one health plan to another because they got a better deal, either through cheaper or more inclusive coverage.

Grow says many Medicare Advantage plans offer members extra benefits not covered by standard Medicare, such as fitness club memberships or vision or dental care, and do a better job of coordinating medical care to keep people active and out of hospitals.

“We have to remember these are plans working hard to deliver the best care they can,” Grow says. Insurers compete vigorously for business and “want to keep members for the long term,” she adds.

Some seniors, wary of problems ahead, are choosing to go with traditional Medicare coverage. Pittsburgh resident Marcy Grupp says she mulled over proposals from Medicare Advantage plans but worried she might need orthopedic or other specialized health care and wanted the freedom to go to any doctor or hospital. She’s decided on standard Medicare coverage and paid for a “Medigap” policy to pick up any uncovered charges.

“Everything is already in place,” says Grupp, a former administrative assistant who turns 65 this month.

The GAO report on Medicare Advantage comes as federal officials are ramping up fines and other penalties against errant health plans.

In the first two months of this year, for instance, the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services fined 10 Medicare Advantage health plans a total of more than $4.1 million for alleged misconduct that “delayed or denied access” to covered benefits, mostly prescription drugs.

In some of these cases, health plans charged patients too much for drugs or failed to advise them of their right to appeal denials of medical services, according to government records. Industry watchers predict more penalties are to come.

Last month, CMS officials ended a 16-month ban on enrollment in Cigna Corp.’s Medicare Advantage plans. CMS took the action after citing Cigna for “widespread and systematic failures” to provide necessary medical care and prescription drugs, policies officials called a “serious threat to enrollee health and safety.”

A flurry of whistleblower lawsuits have surfaced, too. In late May, Freedom Health, a Florida Medicare Advantage insurer, agreed to pay nearly $32 million to settle allegations that it exaggerated how sick some patients were to boost profits, while getting rid of others who cost a lot to treat.

Freedom Health allegedly kept a list of some “unprofitable” patients that it discouraged from staying in the health plan, while encouraging healthier, “more profitable” members to remain, according to the whistleblower suit. Federal regulations prohibit health plans from discriminating based on a person’s health.Asked by Kaiser Health News for comment, Freedom Health corporate counsel Bijal Patel emailed a statement that read, in part: “We agreed to resolve the case so that we can continue focusing on providing excellent care.”

Casey Schwarz, a lawyer with the Medicare Rights Center, a consumer service organization, notes that health plans are required to have a formal process for patients to appeal denials of medical services. She says patients should know their rights and insist on them.

“We want people to vote with their feet and leave plans not serving them,” Schwarz says.

 

Feds join lawsuit alleging UnitedHealth engaged in massive Medicare fraud

March 28, 2017by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged , , ,

By FRED SCHULTE

Kaiser Health News

The Justice Department has joined a California whistleblower’s lawsuit that accuses insurance giant UnitedHealth Group of fraud in its popular Medicare Advantage health plans.

Justice officials filed legal papers to intervene in the suit, first brought by whistleblower James Swoben in 2009, on Friday in federal court in Los Angeles. On Monday, they sought a court order to combine Swoben’s case with that of another whistleblower.

Swoben has accused the insurer of “gaming” the Medicare Advantage payment system by “making patients look sicker than they are,” said his lawyer, William K. Hanagami. Hanagami said the combined cases could prove to be among the “larger frauds” ever against Medicare, with damages that he speculates could top $1 billion.

UnitedHealth spokesman Matt Burns denied any wrongdoing by the company. “We are honored to serve millions of seniors through Medicare Advantage, proud of the access to quality health care we provided, and confident we complied with program rules,” he wrote in an email.

Burns also said that “litigating against Medicare Advantage plans to create new rules through the courts will not fix widely acknowledged government policy shortcomings or help Medicare Advantage members and is wrong.”

Medicare Advantage is a popular alternative to traditional Medicare. The privately run health plans have enrolled more than 18 million elderly and people with disabilities — about a third of those eligible for Medicare — at a cost to taxpayers of more than $150 billion a year.

Although the plans generally enjoy strong support in Congress, they have been the target of at least a half-dozen whistleblower lawsuits alleging patterns of overbilling and fraud. In most of the prior cases, Justice Department officials have decided not to intervene, which often limits the financial recovery by the government and also by whistleblowers, who can be awarded a portion of recovered funds. A decision to intervene means that the Justice Department is taking over investigating the case, greatly raising the stakes.

“This is a very big development and sends a strong signal that the Trump administration is very serious when it comes to fighting fraud in the health care arena,” said Patrick Burns, associate director of Taxpayers Against Fraud, based in Washington, a nonprofit supported by whistleblowers and their lawyers. Burns said the “winners here are going to be American taxpayers.”

Burns also contends that the cases against UnitedHealth could potentially exceed $1 billion in damages, which would place them among the top two or three whistleblower-prompted cases on record.

“This is not one company engaged in episodic bad behavior, but a lucrative business plan that appears to be national in scope,” Burns said.

On Monday, the government said it wants to consolidate the Swoben case with another whistleblower action filed in 2011 by former UnitedHealth executive Benjamin Poehling and unsealed in March by a federal judge. Poehling also has alleged that the insurer generated hundreds of millions of dollars or more in overpayments.

When Congress created the current Medicare Advantage program in 2003, it expected to pay higher rates for sicker patients than for people in good health using a formula called a risk score.

But overspending tied to inflated risk scores has repeatedly been cited by government auditors, including the Government Accountability Office. A series of articles published in 2014 by the Center for Public Integrity found that these improper payments have cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.

“If the goal of fraud is to artificially increase risk scores and you do that wholesale, that results in some rather significant dollars,” Hanagami said.

David Lipschutz, senior policy attorney for the Center for Medicare Advocacy, a nonprofit offering legal assistance and other resources for those eligible for Medicare, said his group is “deeply concerned by ongoing improper payments” to Medicare Advantage health plans.

These overpayments “undermine the finances of the overall Medicare program,” he said in an emailed statement. He said his group supports “more rigorous oversight” of payments made to the health plans.

The two whistleblower complaints allege that UnitedHealth has had a practice of asking the government to reimburse it for underpayments, but did not report claims for which it had received too much money, despite knowing some these claims had inflated risk scores.

The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said in draft regulations issued in January 2014 that it would begin requiring that Medicare Advantage plans report any improper payment — either too much or too little.

These reviews “cannot be designed only to identify diagnoses that would trigger additional payments,” the proposal stated.

But CMS backed off the regulation’s reporting requirements in the face of opposition from the insurance industry. The agency didn’t say why it did so.

The Justice Department said in an April 2016 amicus brief in the Swoben case that the CMS decision not to move ahead with the reporting regulation “does not relieve defendants of the broad obligation to exercise due diligence in ensuring the accuracy” of claims submitted for payment.

The Justice Department concluded in the brief that the insurers “chose not to connect the dots,” even though they knew of both overpayments and underpayments. Instead, the insurers “acted in a deliberately ignorant or reckless manner in falsely certifying the accuracy, completeness and truthfulness of submitted data,” the 2016 brief states.

The Justice Department has said it also is investigating risk-score payments to other Medicare Advantage insurers, but has not said whether it plans to take action against any of them.

What happens when primary-care incentive-pay program ends?

November 24, 2015by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged , , , , ,

By MICHELLE ANDREWS

For Kaiser Health News

Many primary-care practitioners will be a little poorer next year because of the expiration of an Affordable Care Act program that has been paying them a 10 percent bonus for caring for Medicare patients. Some say the loss may trickle down to the patients, who could have a harder time finding a doctor or have to wait longer for appointments. But others say the program has had little impact on their practices, if they were aware of it at all.

The incentive program began in 2011 and was designed to address disparities in Medicare reimbursements between primary-care physicians and specialists. It distributed $664 million in bonuses in 2012, the most recent year that figures are available, to roughly 170,000 primary care practitioners, awarding each an average of $3,938, according to a 2014 reportby the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.

Although that may sound like a small adjustment, it can be important to a primary-care practice, says Dr. Wanda Filer, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. “It’s not so much about the salary as it’s about the practice expense,” she explains. “Family medicine runs on very small margins, and sometimes on negative margins if they’re paying for electronic health records, for example. Every few thousand makes a difference.”

Doctors who specialize in family medicine, internal medicine and geriatrics are eligible for the bonuses, as are nurse practitioners and physician assistants.

Medicare generally pays lower fees for primary-care visits to evaluate and coordinate patients’ care than for procedures that specialists perform. The difference is reflected in physician salaries. Half of primary-care physicians made less than $241,000 in 2014, while for specialists the halfway mark was $412,000, according to the Medical Group Management Association’s annual provider compensation survey.

The impact of the bonus program is larger on practices with a substantial number of Medicare patients. Dr. Andy Lazris estimates 90 percent of the patients that his five-practitioner practice in Columbia, Md., treats are on Medicare.

“When the bonus payments started, it was a pretty big deal for us,”  Dr. Lazris says. The extra $85,000 they received annually allowed them to hire two people to deal with the administrative requirements for being part of an Accountable Care Organization and to help the practice incorporate two new Medicare programs related to managing patients’ chronic diseases or overseeing their moves from a medical facility to home.

Next year, if they can’t make up the lost bonus money by providing more services, it’ll mean a pay cut of $17,000 per practitioner, Lazris says.

Although in some practices, doctors try to see more patients to make up for cuts in reimbursements, that is harder for a group focusing on the elderly. “Part of what we do in geriatrics is spend a lot of time with our patients,” he says. “We have to, when someone has five conditions and takes five minutes to get into the room. The basic office visit is 30 minutes.”

The incentive program was an effort to address shortcomings in Medicare’s system of paying providers mostly a la carte for services, which tends to undervalue primary care providers’ ongoing role in coordinating patients’ care.  Earlier this year, Medpac proposed that Congress replace the expiring primary care incentive program with a per-beneficiary payment to primary care physicians that would be paid for by reducing payments for non-primary care services. That proposal hasn’t made any headway. Meanwhile, physician trade groups have lobbied unsuccessfully for an extension of the Medicare bonus program.

The expiration of the Medicare incentive program is particularly painful because it comes on the heels of a similar bonus program for Medicaid primary care services that ended in 2014, says Dr. Wayne J. Riley, president of the American College of Physicians, a professional organization for internists.

“There will be some physicians who say they can’t take any more Medicare patients,” Riley predicts.

An attorney for an advocacy group for Medicare beneficiaries says they support the bonus payments and hope that physicians won’t shut them out.

“We don’t have any evidence to show that primary care docs will stop seeing Medicare beneficiaries without the payment bump,” says David Lipschutz, a senior policy lawyer  at the Center for Medicare Advocacy.

The vast majority of non-pediatrician primary-care doctors accept patients who are covered by Medicare, according to a national survey of primary care providers by the Commonwealth Fund and the Kaiser Family Foundation. But while 93 percent take Medicare, a smaller percentage, 72 percent, accept new Medicare patients. [Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.]

Not all primary-care practitioners will miss the incentive program, according to the Commonwealth/KFF survey. Only 25 percent of those surveyed said they received a bonus payment; half didn’t know the program existed.

Of physicians who were aware of and received Medicare bonus payments, 37 percent said it made a small difference in their ability to serve their Medicare patients, and 5 percent said it made a big difference. However, nearly half — 48 percent — said it made no difference at all.

 

New rules would modernize nursing homes

July 13, 2015by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged , , , , , , , ,

 

By Susan Jaffe, for Kaiser Health News

kaiserhealthnews.org

After nearly 30 years, the Obama administration wants to modernize the rules nursing homes must follow to qualify for Medicare and Medicaid payments.

The hundreds of pages of proposed changes cover everything from meal times to use of antipsychotic drugs to staffing.  Some are required by the Affordable Care Act and other recent federal laws, as well as the president’s executive order directing agencies to simplify regulations and minimize the costs of compliance.

“Today’s measures set high standards for quality and safety in nursing homes and long-term care facilities,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell. “When a family makes the decision for a loved one to be placed in a nursing home or long-term care facility, they need to know that their loved one’s health and safety are priorities.”

Officials announced the update as the White House Conference on Aging convened Monday.  The once-a-decade conclave sets the agenda for meeting the diverse needs of older Americans, including long-term care options.  This month also marks the 50th anniversary of the Medicare and Medicaid programs, which cover almost 125 million older, disabled or low-income Americans. Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries make up the majority of residents in the country’s more than 15,000 long-term care facilities.

“The existing regulations don’t even conceive of electronic communications the way they exist today,” said Dr. Shari Ling, Medicare’s deputy chief medical officer. “Also there have been significant advances in the science and delivery of healthcare that just weren’t imagined at the time the rules were originally written. For example, the risks of anti-psychotic medications and overuse of antibiotics are now clearly known, when previously they were thought to be harmless.“

The proposed regulations include  a section on electronic health records and measures to better ensure that patients or their families are involved in care planning and in the discharge process.  The rules also would strengthen infection control, minimize the use of antibiotic and antipsychotic drugs and reduce hospital readmissions.

Revised rules would also promote more individualized care and help make nursing homes feel more like home.  For example, facilities would be required to provide “suitable and nourishing alternative meals and snacks for residents who want to eat at non-traditional times or outside of scheduled meal times.”

Residents should also be able to choose their roommates.  “Nursing facilities not only provide medical care, but may also serve as a resident’s home,” the proposed rules say. “Our proposed provision would provide for a rooming arrangement that could include a same-sex couple, siblings, other relatives, long term friends or any other combination” as long as nursing home administrators “can reasonably accommodate the arrangement.”

Consumer advocates are likely to be disappointed that officials are not including recommendations to set a federal nurse-to-resident ratio.

However, the proposed changes would require that nurses be trained in dementia care and preventing elder abuse to better meet residents’ needs.

“We believe that the focus should be on the skill sets and specific competencies of assigned staff,” officials wrote in the proposed rules, “to provide the nursing care a resident needs rather than a static number of staff or hours of nursing care that does not consider resident characteristics.”

Nursing homes will be required to report staffing levels, which Medicare officials said they will review for adequacy.

“It’s a competency approach that goes beyond a game of numbers,” said Ling. “If residents appear agitated, figure out why, get at the cause of the problem,” she said, instead of resorting to drugs to sedate residents.

Advocates for nursing home residents argue that because of inadequate staffing, residents with dementia are often inappropriately given antipsychotic drugs, even though that can be dangerous for them. The new rules would help control the use of these drugs by requiring the facility’s pharmacist to monitor drugs that are prescribed for excessive periods of time or other irregularities and require the resident’s physician to address the problem or explain in the resident’s medical record why the medication is necessary.

“We don’t have enough nursing staff,” Toby Edelman, a senior policy attorney at the Center for Medicare Advocacy, said before the rules were released.  Federal law requires only one registered nurse on the day shift for a 20-bed facility or a 500-bed facility, licensed practical nurses around the clock and sufficient staff to meet residents’ needs, she said.

“We don’t look at the specific staffing positions per se,” said Greg Crist, a spokesman for the American Healthcare Association, which represents 11,000 skilled-nursing facilities.  “We look at the needs of the individuals when determining staff levels, and that is best addressed in the resident’s care plan.”

Although there are also no provisions addressing enforcement in the proposed rule, Ling said  it “will permit detection of violations to enable enforcement  by lessening the noise.”

“The biggest problem is that the rules we have now are not enforced,” said Edelman.  “We have a very weak and timid enforcement system that does everything it can to cajole facilities into compliance instead of imposing penalties for noncompliance.”

A report by the Center for Medicare Advocacy last year found that some serious violations often were not penalized.

“Once the new rules are finalized, they will be added to the items nursing home inspectors check,” Ling said.

Officials look at ways to cut Medicare hospice costs

April 24, 2015by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged , , , , ,

By  SUSAN JAFFE, for Kaiser Health News.

Medicare officials are considering changes in the hospice benefit to stop the federal government from paying twice for care given to dying patients. But patient advocates and hospice providers fear a new policy could make the often difficult decision to move into hospice care even tougher.

Patients are eligible for hospice care when doctors determine they have no more than six months to live. They agree to forgo curative treatment for their terminal illness and instead receive palliative or comfort care. However, they are also still allowed Medicare coverage for health problems not related to their terminal illness, including chronic health conditions, or for accidental injuries.

Medicare pays a set amount to the hospice provider for all treatment and services related to the terminal illness, including doctor’s visits, nursing home stays, hospitalization, medical equipment and drugs.  If a patient needs treatment that hospice doesn’t provide because it is not related to the terminal illness — or the patient seeks care outside of hospice — Medicare pays the non-hospice providers. The problem is that sometimes Medicare pays for care outside the hospice benefit that it already paid hospice to cover.

To reduce the chances of these duplicative payments, Medicare officials have announced that they are examining whether to assume “virtually all” the care that hospice patients receive should be covered under the hospice benefit.

Medicare has been paying millions of dollars in recent years to non-hospice providers for care for terminally ill patients under hospice care, according to government reports.

The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), an independent organization that advised Congress, found that in 2012, Medicare paid $1 billion to hospitals, nursing homes, therapists and other providers for services for hospice patients unrelated to their terminal illness.

The commission did not estimate how much of that was incorrectly billed and should have been covered by hospices. Prescription-drug plans received more than $33 million in 2009 for drugs that probably should have been covered by the hospice benefit, according to an investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general.

Hospice is growing rapidly among older Americans. Of those Medicare beneficiaries who died in 2013, nearly half used hospice, double the rate in 2000, MedPAC also found. Over the same time period, Medicare spending for hospice services grew five-fold, to $15 billion.

Medicare officials initially mentioned last year that they were exploring possible changes. Concerns about duplicative payments “strongly suggests that hospice services are being ‘unbundled,’ negating the hospice philosophy of comprehensive, holistic care and shifting the costs to other parts of Medicare, and creating additional cost-sharing burden to those vulnerable Medicare beneficiaries who are at end-of-life,” they wrote in regulations containing this year’s hospice payment rates and other program rules. Officials have not yet issued a formal proposal.

“There will always be exceptions for people who have terminal conditions and have other conditions that need to be attended to,” said Sean Cavanaugh, deputy administrator at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. “But the majority of their services would be provided through hospice.”

Seniors’ advocates are worried that putting all coverage under the hospice benefit will create obstacles for patients. Instead, Medicare should go after hospice providers who are shifting costs to other providers that Medicare expects hospice to cover, said Terry Berthelot, a senior attorney at the Center for Medicare Advocacy, who urged the government to protect hospice patients’ access to non-hospice care.

“The easiest thing for CMS to do is to say everything would be related to the terminal illness and then there would be no billing problems,” Berthelot said. But federal law, guarantees hospice patients Medicare coverage to control diabetes, blood pressure or other conditions not related to their terminal illness.

“If your blood sugar gets out of control, that could hasten your death,” she said. “But people shouldn’t be rushed off to die because they’ve elected the hospice benefit.”

Cavanaugh said the government is not trying to restrict drugs or other Medicare benefits for hospice patients.

“It’s more about getting the payment right,” he said. “The question is how to clearly circumscribe the benefit, to define what’s in the hospice benefit and what is not.”

That’s not always easy to figure out.

If a cancer patient in hospice slips on some ice and breaks her wrist, the injury could have happened because the cancer has attacked the bones, making them thin and brittle, said Dr. May Al-Abousi, medical director for hospice services at University Hospitals in Cleveland. Treatment for the injury would be covered by hospice.  But the injury would not necessarily be part of the hospice benefit for someone with a terminal illness other than cancer, she said.

“Medicine has no cookbook, where we can apply all-or-none rules,” she said.

Sometimes a hospice provider may not even know when a patient has gone to the hospital and there’s usually no way the hospital knows the patient is in hospice unless the patient makes that clear, said Judi Lund Person, at the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization,  which represents nearly 2,000 hospice companies.

“The emergency room physician should be aware that this is a hospice patient with lung cancer as opposed to an 85-year-old male who fell at Denny’s,” she said.

Patients and their families may be afraid to volunteer that information, said Dr. Al-Abousi.  “A lot of people get scared when they hear the “H” word,” she said.  “They think once they sign that paper for Medicare, nothing else is going to be covered.”

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