By Pepper Fisher
Washington, DC – We’ve been reporting for 3 years about the site neutrality rule that took away a huge chunk of the Medicare reimbursement rates for rural hospitals, including Olympic Medical Center, starting in 2019. It was a crippling policy enacted by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
On Thursday, U.S. Representative Derek Kilmer here in the 6th District announced that the CMS has proposed a new rule that will help what he calls “essential safety-net hospitals” in rural communities, including OMC.
The proposed CMS rule would reverse the site neutrality rule for Rural Sole Community Hospitals, that provide services using off-campus clinics to make health care more accessible to patients.
Site neutrality resulted in steep cuts to the reimbursement rate for Medicare patients treated at OMC’s clinics in Port Angeles and Sequim, from about $118.00 to just $47.00 per patient. Over the long run, OMC estimated the cuts would have resulted in roughly $47 million in lost revenue over the next ten years.
Darryl Wolfe, chief executive officer of OMC says, with Congressman Kilmer taking the lead, they found a way to tailor a new policy designed to restore reimbursements for a very specific group of hospitals like ours.
“What we did is, we really figured out a way to minimize the impact on the budget. And so, by just looking at Rural Sole Community Hospitals, like Olympic Medical Center, it’s really a small number of hospitals that are like us, where we serve a rural community. We’re kind of the major player, but we also provide, you know, imaging and lab and provider, you know, physician services. When you look at it and in the context of the entire CMS budget, it’s a pretty tiny piece, so it was something that was palatable for the federal folks to make this happen.”
Policies like site neutrality come and go as often as Presidential administrations change. Is Wolfe confident that the new policy will survive the whims of fiscal politics in the long term?
“Yeah, I think the numbers are small enough that it’s going to stick for the long term. And I think, my editorial comment is that the last administration came in and they saw this as a way to save money, which we all, of course, we would like to do. But it was kind of a broad stroke, and what this does is, it carves out a small segment of hospitals, that really need the support in rural communities that provide the majority of the care. And so, I think it’s a small enough piece of the budget that it shouldn’t be, as I would say, on the chopping block every single time there’s a change in the administration. But time will tell.”
CMS is accepting comments on the proposed rules through September 13.