Medicare unified post-acute care payments

In support of its proposal that Medicare adopt a unified payment system for post-acute-care services, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission is exploring how to develop uniform outcome measures to support such a new payment system. Under the MedPAC vision, articulated at its early April public meeting, skilled nursing facilities, home health agencies, long-term-care hospitals, and inpatient rehabilitation facilities would see their outcomes quantified based on their performance on a series of quality measures. Meanwhile, there has been little congressional interest in the unified post-acute payment proposal so far.  While some aspects of such a proposal could be implemented administratively, the [...]