Hospice Strategy Blog

On the Friday afternoon before Easter weekend, CMS dropped a bombshell.  In its proposed rule for fiscal year 2020, it lays out an update to the hospice reimbursement rates that would increase all non-routine levels of care significantly. In order to make the change budget-neutral, this means CMS would reduce the scheduled increase to Routine Home Care rates to keep them essentially flat from FY2019 to FY 2020. For hospices that currently provide little or no care at the non-routine levels, this is unadulterated bad news. However, for the average freestanding nonprofit hospice, CMS believes this will have a positive effect of an overall 4.2% increase in revenue. For hospices operating dedicated hospice facilities, I believe the impact may be far better than that.