The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid wants to hear from Critical Access Hospitals on the President’s budget proposal to change CAH reimbursement from 101 to 100 percent and what that would mean to your facility and your community.
NRHA has provided the below sample letter for your review, but please take the time to personalize the letter to tell CMS about your community! We need the CAH community to share with CMS the impact the reduction would have on the ability to provide care to your local community.
NRHA asks that you outline the following issues in your letter.
- Financial Impact– how would this affect hospital operations and the bottom line?
- Access to Healthcare for Rural Communities – What services would be eliminated? Would residents have to drive for essential healthcare services? Which services would be the hardest to sustain?
- Transformation of Care – Potential elimination of work and programs that CAHs have or in the process of implementing to move to value based care, integration of services and so forth. Would you have to eliminate current efforts to implement care coordination or patient centered medical homes or shared services initiatives?
- Unique Circumstances in your Rural Community – would CAHs have to eliminate community based programs that address population needs?
Please send in your letter by June 30 to partnership@cms.hhs.gov . If you have any questions or need help drafting your letter please contact Erin Mahn Zumbrun at emahn@nrharural.org or Diane Calmus at dcalmus@nrharural.org. We would also love to see your letters so we can use your stories in our continued efforts on the Hill to let Congress know what the rural health programs means to communities throughout rural America.
Sample Letter:
Mr. Andrew Slavitt
Acting Administrator
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
Hubert H. Humphrey Building
200 Independence Avenue, SW
Washington, D.C. 20201
Dear Acting Administrator Slavitt,
The (name of organization or hospital) is concerned by the proposed changes to the Critical Access Hospital reimbursement from 101% to 100%. Continued cuts to rural hospitals is creating a chilling effect and exacerbating the specialty care shortage crisis that plaques rural America.
Rural hospitals provide essential, lifesaving local access to health care close to home for the 62 million Americans living in rural and remote communities. Rural hospitals serve vulnerable rural Americans that are older, sicker and poorer then their urban counterparts. These rural Americans are more likely to suffer with a chronic disease that requires monitoring and follow up care, making convenient, local access to care necessary to ensuring patient compliance with the services that are necessary to reduce the overall cost of care and improve the patients’ outcomes and quality of life.
Since 2010, 75 of these critical rural hospitals have closed and today, 673 additional facilities are vulnerable and could close—this represents over 1/3 of rural hospitals in the U.S. Continued Medicare cuts in hospital payments have taken their toll, forcing far too many closures. “Average Medicare margins are negative, and under current law they are expected to decline in 2016” according to the March 2016 MedPAC report, overall “profitability of rural hospitals decreased while the profitability of urban hospitals has increased since FY 2012” according to a study out of the Sheps (Center at University of North Carolina).
So far this year, 12 rural hospitals have already closed. Medical deserts are appearing across rural America, leaving many of our nation’s most vulnerable populations without timely access to care. More Medicare cuts will push more hospitals into a financial situation that will result in closure.
In my community, the result of an additional hospital cut would mean (describe financial impact and what it would mean to access to health care in your community).
I urge you to protect access to local care in (community). If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to email me at XXXX or call me at XXXX.
Sincerely,
Name
Hospital
Address