Treasury extends Medicare insolvency date, citing savings from home health

Treasury extends Medicare insolvency date, citing savings from home health 
McKnights Home Care; by Adam Healy; 5/13/24 
Medicare insolvency received a five-year extension — and part of the reprieve can be attributed to the cost of home health. Myriad factors, including job growth and low unemployment rate, contributed to the extension. The projections were also partly influenced by home health spending which has been “significantly lower than estimated prior to the pandemic,” according to the Social Security and Medicare Trustees report. “As a result of the recent home health staffing shortages, the trustees continue to consider the spending level for this service to be suppressed,” they said in the report. “Thus, they have increased their home health spending growth factor by 2.9 percentage points in each of the next 3 years.”