The National Association for Home Care and Hospice (NAHC) is taking its opposition to home health payment cuts to the courtroom, filing a lawsuit against CMS and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Thursday, July 6, 2023.
The move comes less than a week after CMS released its proposed payment rates for 2024 that included a 2.2% overall payment cut for home health services, driven by a more than 5.6% cut due to PDGM behavioral adjustments to the payment rate. CMS also plans to eventually claw back more than $3.4 billion in what it considers overpayments over the last three years.
The group calls the methodology for rate adjustments under PDGM illogical and invalid and seeks declaratory and injunctive relief, including a reversal of the rate adjustments already made in the 2023 rule and a requirement that Medicare implement the budget neutrality mandate consistent with the law.
“We have done everything possible to get Medicare to understand the disastrous consequences of its actions,” NAHC President William Dombi said in a statement. “We have presented hard facts, deep legal analyses and extensive data to Medicare that demonstrate the errors in its policies to no avail.”