Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson joined colleagues today by requesting House leadership pass legislation to preserve rural health care access to high quality health care services. Members of the House Rural Health Care Coalition, of which Simpson is a member, requested leadership to act on this issue before Congress adjourns for the year.
The letter specifically requests to extend the rural health payment adjustments that were established in the Medicare Modernization Act, many of which have now expired or are set to expire at the end of this year.
“Our rural communities should have access to quality care without being required to drive long distances unnecessarily. We should applaud our hospitals for bringing health care directly to the patients in their communities rather than punishing them with lower reimbursement rates,” Simpson said.
Specifically, the House Rural Health Care Coalition asked leadership to include in legislation Congress may consider in the coming weeks an extension of the critical rural health provisions described below:
Rural Hospitals: Our rural hospitals provide essential inpatient, outpatient and post-acute care, including skilled nursing, home health and rehabilitation services, to nearly 9 million Medicare beneficiaries. We support an extension of Section 508 of the MMA which provides for the geographical wage index reclassification for over 120 hospitals which provides for greater wage parity within a state in order to address increasingly competitively labor markets. In addition, it is critical that Congress ensures that small rural hospitals continue to be reimbursed for their costs for their laboratory services and preserves outpatient hold harmless payments for sole community and small rural hospitals. We also support an extension of direct billing under Medicare for certain grandfathered labs for the technical component of pathology services provided to certain rural hospitals.
Rural Doctors and Practitioners: Only ten percent of physicians practice in rural America even though more than a quarter of the population lives in these areas. In order to help recruit and retain physicians where they are needed most, it is imperative that we continue to provide a five percent incentive payment for doctors and practitioners practicing in underserved areas as well as maintain the 1.0 floor on the physician work geographic practice cost index (GPCI).
Rural Ambulance and Home Health: It costs rural ambulance and home health providers more than their urban counterparts to provide critical services to patients because of the greater distances rural providers travel to reach those in their large service areas. In fact, many of our rural ambulance providers are staffed primarily by volunteers and our rural home health providers are struggling to stay afloat. That is why it is necessary to ensure that rural home health providers continue to receive an additional five percent and ambulance providers an additional two percent of their Medicare reimbursement in order to help cover the costs of serving patients located in these areas.
