Recovering from a serious illness or injury is difficult, especially when a hospital does not provide a comfortable and familiar environment for healing. This is where home health care is essential for seniors, most of whom prefer to return home to receive care.
But the constant cuts by Medicare for the home health program jeopardize the availability of care for elderly Americans and people with disabilities requiring post-acute assistance, especially those wanting to return home after hospitalization. These cuts are detrimental across the state; however, they are felt even harder in rural communities across Minnesota.
Congress can protect home health care from these cuts.
By bridging the gap between medical expertise and the comforts of home, home health is an indispensable pillar of comprehensive health care, championing holistic recovery and improved quality of life. This can be a difficult process and involves many nurses, physical and occupational therapists, social workers and home health aides to create a comfortable environment for recovery.
As Medicare keeps cutting home health care, it becomes more difficult for hospitals to send patients home for recovery and care. Like the rest of the health care industry, home health is under threat from the labor shortage, creating a gap between the demand for home health and those who can provide it.
Currently, Minnesota alone is looking to hire more than 9,000 home health and personal care aides, and thousands more nursing assistants and nurses. Cuts to Medicare’s home health program only magnify this trend, and patients are forced to shoulder the consequences.
Medicare is proposing to increase permanent cuts to the home health care program to more than 9% beginning in 2024, which will have a gross impact of $8.1 million on Minnesota’s home health community next year. These cuts will leave more than 37,000 Minnesota Medicare beneficiaries at risk. Nationally, these cuts will total up to $25 billion over the next decade. Considering the challenges home health care already faces, these cuts could dramatically alter Medicare’s home health system, especially in rural areas that are already underserved in many aspects of health care.
In Minnesota, roughly 87% of home health care patients have three or more chronic conditions, meaning they are extremely vulnerable and require more serious care. The proposed cuts to Medicare’s home health care program could disrupt or eliminate access to treatment for some of the state’s sickest seniors. The health care sector already has a shortage of providers, forcing many patients to struggle to find care; taking away critical post-hospital care does not make any sense.
Fortunately, some in Congress are taking action to fight this attack on Medicare’s home healthcare program. The bipartisan, bicameral Preserving Access to Home Health Act (S. 2137/H.R. 5129) provides hope for home health patients, families and clinicians alike.
If passed, this bill would protect Medicare’s home health care program from cuts until at least 2028. It would also require MedPAC, an agency which provides policy analysis regarding Medicare to Congress, to fully understand the economic needs of the home health system and work to support these programs in the future.
Home health care in Minnesota, and the United States as a whole, is at a crossroads. The future of patient well-being and access to vital care services is at risk, making it essential for Congress to act and pass the Preserving Access to Home Health Act.
American seniors have a right to heal and age in their homes.