Hospice community urges Obama to stop cuts to Medicare benefit
More than 3,500 hospice providers from across the country have sent letters urging President Barack Obama to stop cuts to the Medicare hospice benefit beginning on Oct. 1, 2009.
Providers say the cuts threaten to jeopardize the availability of care that 1.5 million patients and their family caregivers receive from hospices each year.
In addition to the letter, more than 500 providers from the hospice community submitted comments to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on how the cuts will cause decreased services, reduced staffing and, in some cases, closed programs.
This follows two letters sent to Obama by 45 Senators and 171 Representatives as an effort to demonstrate that he has bipartisan support to stop the cuts in hospice funding.
"The sheer number of hospice programs represented by this letter and those recently sent by members of Congress should send a strong message to the White House about the urgency in stopping these cuts," said J. Donald Schumacher, president and CEO of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.
The cuts come from a 2008 federal rule that eliminates a component of the Medicare hospice benefit known as the budget neutrality adjustment factor (BNAF). Members of the hospice community have been calling and e-mailing the administration requesting that implementation of this rule be stopped.
Earlier this year, Obama and Congress approved a moratorium on the hospice funding cuts that expires on Sept. 30, 2009. Without further action, hospice reimbursements will drop by 3.1 percent, leaving hospice programs, particularly smaller and rural ones, facing cutbacks in services and possible closure.
In 2007, an independent, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded study by Duke University found that hospice reduced Medicare costs by $2,300 per patient, saving more than $2 billion per year.
