The federal government is overreaching in its imposition of a national moratorium on new Medicare home health and hospice enrollments, according to Al Cardillo, president and CEO of the Home Care Association of New York State, and Mordechai Wolhendler, founder and CEO of GlattHealth, a New York-based consulting group. The home health industry already is in steady decline in New York with only 100 agencies, they told McKnight’s Home Care in a Newsmakers podcast. The federal government instead should work with the home care community not only to root out fraudulent providers but also to create mechanisms and policies to head off fraud and modernize and update the Medicare benefit, they said.
In addition to facing the Medicare home health and hospice moratorium, New York home care providers have been grappling with the federal government’s scrutiny of its Medicaid personal care program. The state defended the program appropriately, including pointing out that some of its data was off the mark, noted Al Cardillo, president and CEO of the Home Care Association of New York State. It’s important not to paint the whole program with a broad brush of fraud and abuse when it might be an administrative problem, he pointed out. New York’s Medicaid personal care program has a lot of anti-fraud protections, and the state actually rolled out Electronic Visit Verification before the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services took it to a national scale, commented Mordechai Wolhendler, founder and CEO of GlattHealth. One of the reasons the Medicaid personal care program has attracted so much national attention is it consumes most of the nation’s Medicaid personal care dollars, Cardillo said. And now most of the program is the Consumer-Directed Personal Care Program (CDPAP), which allows the consumer to choose their caregiver who can be a family member. Internally, CDPAP has been dealing with a major transformation, moving more than 600 fiscal intermediaries to one. The lesson from this fraught experience is that stakeholders and the state are in it together, Wolhendler said.
Follow us on social media:
X: @McKHomeCare
Facebook: McKnight's Home Care
LinkedIn: McKnight's Home Care
Instagram: mcknights_homecare
Follow Home Care Association of New York on social media:
X: @HCANYS
Facebook: Home Care Association of New York State
LinkedIn: HCANYS - Home Care Association of New York State
Instagram: hcanys
Follow GlattHealth on social media:
LinkedIn: GlattHealth Consulting Group
Show contributors:
McKnight’s Home Care Editor Liza Berger; Al Cardillo, president and CEO of the Home Care Association of New York State; and Mordechai Wolhendler, founder and CEO of GlattHealth, a New York-based consulting group