The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) will delve into the adequacy of skilled nursing facility payment levels at the panel’s annual December meeting next Friday morning.
SNFs will be one of a handful of healthcare-related groups learning what their recommended pay levels should be during MedPAC sessions Thursday and Friday (Dec. 7-8).
By law, the congressional advisory body must meet and review Medicare’s fee-for-service payment policies and make recommendations for the next fiscal year. MedPAC has recommended trimming SNF reimbursements every year in recent memory, though the politicians they advise have remained resistant to doing so.
Effects of ongoing staffing shortages, which could be exacerbated by a federal minimum staffing mandate that’s been proposed, could be a key topic of discussion. Commissioners are expected to discuss beneficiaries’ access to SNF care, quality of care, SNFs’ access to capital, and the relationship between Medicare’s payments and SNFs’ costs.
MedPAC’s December 2023 public meeting will be held virtually via video conference on the GoToWebinar platform.
Given the limited number of registrants allowed for each session, officials recommend signing up only for sessions that one is able to attend.
The SNF-discussion session can be signed up for here.
Also discussed that morning will be home health care and inpatient rehab facility services.
Physician and other healthcare services will be discussed at Thursday morning’s session, while that day’s afternoon session will dig into payments for hospital inpatient and outpatient, hospice and outpatient dialysis services.More on the MedPAC meetings next week can be found at the group’s website.
