HCA Releases Home Care Reform and Efficiency Plan

Download: HCA's Press Release on our Reform and Efficiency Plan

For Immediate Release: January 12, 2011

Contact:

Roger Noyes (518) 810-0665; (518) 275-6961 cell

HCA Issues Home Care Reform and Efficiency Recommendations
Eleven-point plan offers responsible, constructive and practical reform and cost-savings solutions

As the state weighs major changes to Medicaid during this year's budget process, the Home Care Association of New York State (HCA) today issued an eleven-point plan offering concrete, practical and workable policies for reforming and yielding additional cost-savings in New York's home and community based health care system.

Called A Blueprint for Home Care Reform and Efficiency, HCA's plan (see attached) recommends payment reforms, improved patient assessment procedures, better matching and guiding of patients to program options, regulatory relief measures, statutory efficiencies, and new processes for: directing patients into programs with stronger care-management capacity; averting unnecessary and costlier institutionalization; more efficient program management; and partnering with the federal government to share Medicare savings from cost-effective home care models.

"New York's health care system as a whole cannot function without a strong and stable home care safety-net that helps patients avoid higher-cost services and allows patients to return home safely from the hospital or other inpatient setting," said HCA President Joanne Cunningham. "Our reform plan will reinforce the strengths of New York's existing home care infrastructure and protect access to care through new ideas that yield much-needed cost savings."

"The home care community has had enough of massive reimbursement cuts and ill-conceived system overhaul proposals which threaten to dismantle all that is good about home care in a haphazard effort to curb costs," Ms. Cunningham added, referring to over $430 million in Medicaid cuts directed at home care providers just since 2008. "Now is the time for meaningful, practical, creative and realistic reform."

"These game-changing reform and efficiency proposals come directly from the field, where people know the system best and appreciate the need for realistic changes that work," she added.

HCA has long been a leader in offering cost-savings proposals as part of New York's state budget efforts. In 2009, the Governor and Legislature incorporated an HCA-developed medication pre-fill efficiency proposal as part of the budget to save an estimated $20 million per year. The provision was just one of several cost-efficiencies offered in HCA's "Home Care Accessibility and Efficiency Improvement Act." A Blueprint for Home Care Reform and Efficiency builds upon those past efforts by proposing additional home care cost-savings and reforms.

For this year's budget, Governor Cuomo has assembled a Medicaid Redesign Team modeled after a "stakeholder" process used in the state of Wisconsin to reform its Medicaid program by bringing together an array of health care system representatives "charged with reducing costs through program redesigns rather than traditional rate or formula reimbursement changes," the Governor stated in his January 5 State of the State Address.

"HCA's proposals must be included within any good-faith effort to put creative ideas ahead of chronic budget cuts, which have already left two-thirds of providers operating in the red," Ms. Cunningham concluded.

The Home Care Association of New York State (HCA), the state's premier home care association, represents approximately 500 providers, individuals, and associate members who collectively serve thousands of New Yorkers.

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