Federal Advocacy

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.

Home Care and Federal Health Reform

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.

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):

• Eliminate Potential Double Hit on Medicare Funding for Home Health Services: Support a full market basket update for Medicare home health services and repeal the Case Mix Creep CMS Medicare Cut.
• Reverse or Correct CMS Administrative Actions: Reverse a rule that modifies reimbursement for case management service, hampering the coordination of care; maintain spousal impoverishment protections for recipients of CMS waiver programs; reverse the prohibition on needy individuals being served by dual waiver programs.

»Download a New York Congressional Delegation letter — led by U.S. Representatives Eliot Engel (D-Bronx) and Peter King (R-Seaford) — to CMS on the dual waiver issue.

• Make Permanent New York's Third-Party Liability (TPL) Demonstration Project: The TPL helps eliminate the complexity involved in juggling multiple payor sources when patients are dual eligible for Medicaid and Medicare.
• 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.