Federal Advocacy

HCA is very active on the federal level to ensure that regulatory, funding and legislative decisions in Washington serve the best interests of New York's mission-driven home care providers — especially in the context of federal health reform.

As the home care community continues to face the threat of federal regulatory changes, HCA is adding these online advocacy tools to help you contact your Congressional leaders and encourage their support for home health care.
Congress:

Click here to find your Congressional Representative by entering your zip code into the member search engine in the upper left-hand corner of the U.S. Congress homepage.

Click here to directly contact your Congressional Representative using the Congressional online contact system. Please be sure to fill out all of the requested information.

HCA's Legislative Action Center

HCA's Legislative Action Center offers a platform for members to send an advocacy message to their state and federal elected leaders with a quick push of the button.

ISSUE SUMMARIES

The following are one-page summaries of the issues HCA has focused on during our federal advocacy efforts (all files are downloadable PDFs):

Impact of CMS's 2011 PPS Final Rule on NY's Home Health Agencies

To mitigate a growing threat to access to home care services in New York State, Congress must take action to fix damaging and/or arbitrary home health funding cuts/proposals advanced in the regulatory process by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in its 2011 final rule for home health PPS.

These damaging actions include: 1) the imposition of an overly restrictive regulatory policy surrounding the new statutory requirement that requires home health patients to undergo a face-to-face physician encounter to access service; and 2) a proposal to reduce provider rates through an arbitrary case-mix adjustment.

In addition, providers in New York State face an additional one percentage point reduction to the 2011-13 Medicare home health market basket update.  This reimbursement cut further exacerbates the poor financial position of New York State's home care provider community.

Download the issue brief

Make Permanent New York's Third-Party Liability (TPL) Demo Project

The TPL helps eliminate the complexity involved in juggling multiple payor sources when patients are dual eligible for Medicaid and Medicare.

Download the issue brief

Reinstate the 5% Medicare Rural Add-on

Nearly 50% of New York's counties are designated rural by CMS. Twenty-five of these counties are served by only one or two home health agencies. Twelve are served only by the county-sponsored Certified Home Health Agency (CHHA) and/or Long Term Home Health Care Program (LTHHCP). Rural agencies face the greatest challenges in terms of workforce shortages and the need to deliver services to sparse populations. HCA believes that Congress should permanently extend the 5% Medicare rural add-on for home health services delivered in rural areas so that access to skilled home and community based care is not threatened.

Download the issue brief