Commission Recommendations
MedPAC makes recommendations to the Congress and to the Secretary of Health and Human Services on issues affecting the administration of the Medicare program. With its recommendations, the Commission strives to improve the delivery of care, while ensuring financial stability and maximizing value for the program. After extensive analysis and evaluation, our recommendations are discussed and voted on by Commissioners in our public meetings. Recommendations are typically published in two main reports, released in March and June of each year.
| Recommendations | Topic(s) | Publication |
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Access to home health services (E)The Secretary should improve the applicability of the Medicare fee-for-service appeals process for home health users and establish a mechanism for informing beneficiaries about their rights to appeal determinations of noncoverage by home health agencies. |
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Post-Acute Care Providers: Moving toward Prospective Payment (A)The Secretary should collect a core set of patient assessment information across all post-acute settings. |
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Post-Acute Care Providers: Moving toward Prospective Payment (B)The Secretary should establish quality monitoring systems for post-acute care as prospective payment systems are implemented. |
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Post-Acute Care Providers: Moving toward Prospective Payment (C)The Secretary should conduct a demonstration to assess the potential of the Functional Independence Measure-Function Related Groups classification system to predict the resource use of intensive rehabilitation patients in skilled nursing facilities. |
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Post-Acute Care Providers: Moving toward Prospective Payment (D)The Secretary should continue to refine the classification system used in the skilled nursing facility prospective payment system to improve its ability to predict the resources associated with nontherapy ancillary services. |
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Post-Acute Care Providers: Moving toward Prospective Payment (E)The Secretary should explore the potential for revising the rehabilitation groups of the classification system used in the skilled nursing facility prospective payment system to reduce reliance on measurements of rehabilitation time. |
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Post-Acute Care Providers: Moving toward Prospective Payment (F)The Secretary should develop a method for updating payment weights in the skilled nursing facility prospective payment system as soon as possible. |
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Post-Acute Care Providers: Moving toward Prospective Payment (G)The Secretary should identify any distortions in the base payment rates of the skilled nursing facility prospective payment system and explore options for correcting them as better data become available. |
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Post-Acute Care Providers: Moving toward Prospective Payment (H)The Secretary should develop ways to ensure skilled nursing facilities’ accountability for accurately assessing patient needs and classifying them for payment purposes. |
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Post-Acute Care Providers: Moving toward Prospective Payment (I)The Secretary should develop a wage index based on skilled nursing facility wage data and use it to adjust payments for those facilities’ services. |
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