The Affordable Care Act is to blame for cuts to home health care medical reimbursements, said Republican U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell during a recent rally in Louisville.
The cuts are projected to affect around 21,000 Kentuckians over the next four years, critics say.
“[The reductions are] in effect raiding Medicare to provide subsidies for people who are not old and are not poor enough to be eligible for Medicaid,” said McConnell, according to a The Courier-Journal article. “This is one of the problems with Obamacare, and here you have a perfect example of how it is devastating the home health care industry.”
The Partnership for Quality Home Health Care, a Washington-based coalition of home health care companies, is calling on Congress to back legislation that would forgo cuts and instead seek savings with reforms to hospital readmission policies.
According to the coalition, the first 3.5% cut to the Medicare home health care benefit took effect in January, and reimbursements are scheduled be cut by the same amount each year through 2017 — totaling a 14% reduction.
“Advocates say that could leave more than a third of the state’s home health care agencies operating at a net loss and jeopardize jobs for 8,600 workers — all at a time when the population is aging and chronic illness is becoming more widespread,” The Courier-Journal reports.
McConnell’s Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes responded to McConnell’s comments saying “Mitch McConnell actually voted to protect the same cuts to Medicare that he now decries weeks before election day.”
Read the article here.
Written by Cassandra Dowell
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