On Monday evening, the Congressional super committee tasked
to recommend $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction announced that it failed to come to
bipartisan agreement. This announcement was made after months of apparent
struggle by the 12-person committee to agree on where to trim funds over the
next ten years.
The end of the super committee debates, however, signals the
new beginning of a familiar fight over Medicare spending. As always, the
Association is working diligently to promote responsible spending of Medicare
funds and proactively shrink costs. AHCA has already designed and
promoted a proposal to reduce Medicare costs for post-acute care and encourage
skilled nursing facilities to reduce $5 billion worth of hospital readmissions
over 10 years.
As proposals from various
groups regarding where the nation will trim its budget begin to surface,
Congress must first focus its upcoming December agenda on how to save billions
of dollars to offset the upcoming expiration of a legislative fix that has
prevented annual cuts in payments to doctors.
Medicare is considered a very likely source for this pricey
cut—a cut that comes on top of the 2% slash in the automatic trigger resulting
from the inability of the super committee to develop an alternative plan to
trim budgets.
More cuts to the long term care profession via Medicare mean
that access to quality health care is once again being threatened. As the
final days of 2011 wind down, AHCA is gearing up to protect
the funds necessary to keep high quality, person-centered care available to
families and loved ones across the nation in 2012 and beyond.