Health Affairs September 28, 2016
About 40 percent of Medicare beneficiaries discharged from an acute care hospital go on to use post-acute care (PAC) from skilled nursing facilities (SNFs), home health agencies (HHAs), inpatient rehabilitation facilities (IRFs), and long-term care hospitals (LTCHs). Medicare’s payments to the more than 29,000 providers of these services totaled $59 billion (or 20 percent of Medicare fee-for-service spending) in 2014.
This care offers important recuperation and rehabilitation services to Medicare beneficiaries, but there are few evidence-based criteria to guide decisions about where beneficiaries should be treated following a hospital stay and how much care they should receive. Congress requested that the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) recommend features of a unified payment system and consider the effects of moving to...
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