OIG audit: CMS should improve hospital wage index adjustments for rural hospitals

The Facilities for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ clinic wage index technique is just not performing ample to support facilities in the bottom quartile, precisely those in rural areas, according to an audit executed by the Section of Wellness and Human Expert services Office of Inspector Basic.

OIG’s audit discovered that of the hospitals in the bottom quartile of the location wage index for the federal fiscal year 2020, 53% ended up in rural parts. These hospitals also tended to be smaller and reduced-quantity facilities, according to the report.

Because of these results, the watchdog agency urges CMS to aim its bottom quartile wage index adjustment on hospitals with very low or damaging profit margins fairly than the kinds with better, constructive profit margins.

It additional instructed that CMS seem into why some hospitals in a specified location could fork out better wages than other hospitals in the exact same location, even ahead of the use of the bottom quartile wage index adjustment.

What is THE Influence

The bottom quartile was designed up of 866 hospitals throughout 24 states and Puerto Rico. There ended up six that accounted for 41% of the bottom quartile hospitals – Puerto Rico, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and West Virginia. Just about every of these had additional than ninety% of their whole hospitals in the bottom quartile.

Much more than 50 percent of the hospitals in the cheapest quartile are in states that did not expand Medicaid below the provisions of the Cost-effective Treatment Act. In concept, growing Medicaid can increase clinic revenues since formerly uninsured sufferers could become insured below Medicaid and find cure, ensuing in better volumes, according to OIG.

States that had hospitals in the cheapest quartile also had the cheapest least wages, with most states that offer the federal least wage ($seven.twenty five) falling into the bottom quartile.

The audit also discovered that clinic profit margins inside the previous quartile various noticeably. For illustration, the margins ranged from -133% to 47% for 2016. Of the 783 hospitals for which information was collected, 303 had damaging profit margins that year.

THE Bigger Development

CMS takes advantage of location wage indexes to adjust Medicare normal payments to hospitals in the inpatient and outpatient future payment techniques to mirror the costs hospitals face in their neighborhood labor marketplaces.

It takes advantage of wage information from 4 a long time prior in the calculations, which raises problems about how it could stop some hospitals from increasing wages.

To make up for that, beginning in 2020, CMS started adjusting the clinic wage index to provide the hospitals in the bottom quartile closer to those in better quartiles. CMS designs to go on this tactic for at least 4 a long time with the hope that hospitals in the bottom quartile will use the prospect afforded by better Medicare payments to raise wages.

CMS has also made a new price-based mostly payment design for rural health care providers, termed the Group Wellness Accessibility and Rural Transformation (CHART) Model. It gives support by way of new seed funding and payment constructions, operational and regulatory flexibilities and technical and discovering support.

On top of that, CMS enhanced Medicare payment costs for inpatient psychiatric facilities, expert nursing facilities and hospices by 2.2%, 2.2%, and 2.4%, respectively.

ON THE Record

“We acknowledge that CMS’s initiative to limit clinic load all through the pandemic could make it hard for CMS to aim on new initiatives,” OIG mentioned in the audit. “However, when submit-pandemic circumstances let for new initiatives, CMS could contemplate concentrating the bottom quartile wage index adjustment additional exactly towards the hospitals that are the least capable to raise wages with no that adjustment.”

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