National Organizations Support ‘The Resetting the IMPACT Act’

Major post-acute care organizations, including the National Association for Home Care & Hospice (NAHC), have commended members of Congress for introducing The Resetting the IMPACT Act (TRIA) of 2021 and urge legislators to support the bill.

This legislation would make amendments to the unified post-acute care payment prototype that was mandated under the Improving Medicare Post-Acute Care Transformation (IMPACT) Act of 2014.

NAHC reports, “While we support many of the goals of the Act — such as the standardization of key patient assessment elements like social determinants of health — we also jointly share a number of concerns that predated the PHE. One of our primary concerns relate to the fact that each of our PAC settings have undergone significant payment system reforms in the past few years, and these changes have not been fully reflected in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) prototype work-to-date. To help address this issue, we have urged collection and incorporation of more current data to ensure payment adequacy for all providers.”

Additionally, factors related to the COVID-19 pandemic would significantly complicate the use of data from this period in any sort of unified PAC payment analysis and modeling effort. NAHC therefore, “applauds TRIA of 2021’s provisions that would exempt any data from the PHE from being captured in the unified PAC payment prototype,” and, “views this legislation as being a critical safeguard for patients, providers, and the Medicare program at large. “