Hello everyone, and welcome to our Monday Minute. Today I want to talk to you briefly about Medicare Advantage. A hot topic, right? The scary part is it’s not only a hot topic in Home Health, but it’s also becoming more and more of a hot topic in Hospice. So today, I just wanted to make sure that everyone saw the good news, if you can say there’s ever good news, with Medicare Advantage. CMS has issued a rule with comment, regarding cost-sharing with Medicare Advantage plans, and they are going to force them, effective January 1, 2023, to implement that the cost-sharing that they can charge a patient be limited to the exact same cost-sharing that would be in place if the patient were a traditional fee for service patient, under the Medicare benefit.
This is huge, because of the fact that there have been patients who have refused Home Health services, and likely other services, because of the fact that they had these high co-pays that had they been on traditional Medicare, they would not have had. So, patients were definitely feeling the impact of access to care and we are very excited that CMS has made this decision and again, it will be effective January 1, 2023.
I also wanted to make sure for Hospice providers that might be watching this today to ensure that you knew that there has already been an RFA released for the VBID demonstration for the calendar year 2023. There are some important aspects of the VBID model that they are looking forward to implementation for 2023 that you’re going to want to pay attention to. Also, knowing that the application process for Medicare Advantage Organizations to participate in the VBID model in 2023, has just passed April 15 was that deadline, they are going to be provisionally affirmed into the program sometime in May. Then they have to go through a process of developing their VBID, giving the Medicare system information regarding how their plans being a part of the VBID demonstration will help the Medicare program. In September 2022, we should have a detailed list of all MAO plans that will participate in in 2023.
We want to thank you all for participating today. I know Medicare Advantage can be a very difficult situation now whether you’re a Home Health or Hospice agency. If there’s ever anything that we can assist you with, please don’t hesitate to let us know. We definitely are traveling, traveling, traveling these days, and participating in many live events. In addition to annual conferences, I know that there are district meetings going on in states that I know about for sure, Ohio and Florida. So if you are in those states or any other state where you’re active in the state association, which we strongly encourage, you should look into any events that are coming up and interact with your fellow caregivers and providers and see what’s really going on out there and see what assistance that you might be to the association is continuing to fight and take care of patients during this Public Health Emergency.
Thanks again for listening today and I hope you have a great week.