U.S. nursing homes will experience an 11.4 percent cut in Medicare payments effective October 2011, the Herald-Tribune reports.
And for the state of Florida, that cut, combined with a 6.5 percent rollback in state Medicaid reimbursements, will leave some nursing home facilities with no way to meet payroll expenses.
As a result, patients and their families can expect to see diminishing staff, disappearing amenities, and possibly no beds available for the sickest patients — who need the highest and most costly levels of care, according to the Herald-Tribune.
Hospitals, then, will likely be forced to keep more people who could be cared for more economically in nursing homes.
The national Medicare cut, announced in May, is intended to recover expenses from 2010, when a new payment formula was deemed overly generous. Florida nursing homes have relied on that extra money to help cover losses on their Medicaid patients. An unknown number of nursing homes are expected to close unless government funding is restored in time.
Kristen Knapp, communications director for the Florida Health Care Association, told the Herald-Tribune that job losses due to the cuts are inevitable since staffing makes up 70 percent of a facility's costs and 80 percent of Florida nursing home patients rely on government funding.
The Medicare cutback for now, Knapp added, means a loss of almost $332 million this year for Florida nursing homes — more than 7 percent of the $4.47 billion cut nationwide. The hardest hit will be places that specialize in treating short-term patients after hospital stays, such as the Inn at Sarasota Bay Club, which offers rehabilitation to surgical patients.
"The majority of the folks that we serve at the Inn are Medicare patients, so that revenue stream to us is, more or less, $6 million a year," Steve Roskamp, a partner in Roskamp Patterson, which owns the facility, told the Herald-Tribune. "We expected a correction, because we were getting a few more bucks a day than what we expected. But an 11 percent correction was not what we expected it to be."
Debra Sandberg, the Inn's administrator, noted that Medicare funds help subsidize the 15 percent of its population who are Medicaid patients. According to Roskamp, the annual reimbursements from Medicaid are about $50,000 less per patient than from Medicare or private insurance.
According to Sandberg, while some shaky nursing homes will go under, stronger ones will be forced to choose residents carefully. "There's going to be a lot more screening of patients from all perspectives," Sandberg told the Herald-Tribune. "It's a way of rationing care without saying you're doing it."
