
Home healthcare services are when a professional from a Medicare-certified home health agency comes to an elderly person’s house and provides nursing care, physical therapy, or speech-language pathology services.
Sebelius cut the maximum permitted by law, 3.5 percent, and declared HHS would do the same for the next three years.
As Angle’s report: noted, “The cuts were deep enough that officials offered a damaging prediction of the impact saying, it was estimated that approximately 40 percent of providers would have negative margins.”
“Negative margins” is another term for losing money. And businesses that lose money either go kaput or lay off workers. Forty percent of the firms in the industry adds up to roughly a half-million jobs. That doesn’t mean that 500,000 home health care workers will be fired tomorrow, but it does mean that they’re at serious risk for layoffs in the next three years.
So we’re talking about a massive job-killer in a field dedicated to treating the health problems of the elderly.
Here’s industry research firm IBISWorld, basically declaring that the outlook for what was, not long ago, one of the fastest-growing health care fields looks grim:
Prior to December 2013, the Home Care Providers industry
was quickly becoming one of the fastest growing healthcare industries
in the United States. Home care saves billions of dollars every year by
allowing patients to avoid high-cost healthcare settings, such as
hospitals…
To help pay for other provisions of the
recent healthcare legislation, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services announced the implementation of a four-year 3.5% annual
reduction to the Medicare base payment for home healthcare services
beginning in January 2014. The National Association for Home Care and
Hospice estimates that the magnitude of these reductions will likely
render three-quarters of all industry operators unable to run profitably
by 2017.
According to the Partnership for Quality Home Healthcare, the industry experienced its largest job loss in more than a decade in December 2013;
although the Medicare reductions were not officially implemented until
2014, CMS’s announcement was enough to spur industry operators to begin
cutting costs. The industry is aggressively lobbying Congress to
reconsider or revoke these reductions, but unless that happens,
IBISWorld expects industry revenue to decrease in the five years to
2019. Spurred by slow revenue growth in 2014, IBISWorld also anticipates
significant profit losses across the industry, with average margins
decreasing by 2019.
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