Nursing home operators will receive an aggregate $750 million Medicare pay increase for fiscal year 2021 under a final rule announced Friday by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. It would amount to a 2.2% net increase starting Oct. 1, when fiscal year 2021 begins.
Originally, CMS proposed a 2.3% net increase, or $784 million, for fiscal 2021. That amount would have been the byproduct of a 2.7% market basket increase, minus a 0.4% reduction for multifactor productivity adjustment.
This estimated increase is attributable to a 2.2% market basket increase and adjusted by a 0.0 percentage point productivity adjustment, the agency explained.
CMS also plans to apply a 5% cap to any decreases in a providers wage index from fiscal 2020 to 2021 under the rule. That cap will be informed by revised geographic delineations provided by the White House Office of Management and Budget to identify a provider’s status as an urban or rural facility and to calculate the wage index.
The final rule also finalizes changes to the ICD-10 code mappings used under the Patient Driven Payment Model to classify skilled nursing patients/residents into payment groups. Additionally, the rule finalizes updates to the SNF Value-Based Purchasing program to reflect previously finalized policies and updates the 30-day Phase One Review and Correction deadline to the baseline period quality measure quarterly report.
CMS did not make changes to the measures, SNF VBP scoring policies or payment policies.
A CMS fact sheet on the final rule can be found here; the final rule itself can be found here.
This article appeared in the McKnight’s Business Daily, a joint effort of McKnight’s Senior Living and McKnight’s Long-Term Care News.
