•Press Release Disability Health and Social Programs Healthcare Private Equity United States Workers
For Immediate Release
Media Contact: Kelsey Moore, 862-324-1213, [email protected]
Washington, DC – A new article titled “The New Hospital-at-Home Movement: Opportunity or Threat for Patient Care?” by CEPR’s Eileen Appelbaum and Cornell University’s Rosemary Batt is published online today in The Gerontological Society of America’s Public Policy & Aging Report. The article is based on a larger report released by the authors earlier this year.
In January, Congress extended the hospital-at-home program through 2024. Certified by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in 2020, the program allowed hospitals to treat acutely ill patients in their homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. They received the same reimbursement rates hospitals get for in-patient care, including a “facilities fee” meant to cover the costs of maintaining the hospital. This occurs despite much lower overhead and infrastructure costs of caring for the patient at home. The program required that certain safeguards be met, but relaxed others such as 24/7 RN coverage, while also allowing in-home care to be provided by an RN, a paraprofessional, or an EMT.
Now healthcare providers and private equity firms that stand to benefit financially from hospital-at-home have organized lobbying groups to make the program permanent for non-crisis conditions. They frame the program as saving costs while increasing patient satisfaction. But Appelbaum and Batt’s research raises serious questions. In reality, the program allows providers to reduce skilled nursing standards, while also shifting risks and added labor costs to families.
“Beyond a handful of pre-pandemic small studies, no systematic evidence exists that the current CMS at-home programs provide the same level of care that hospitals provide for the acutely-ill. Too many questions remain unanswered, and CMS lacks the necessary reporting and data systems to ensure provider accountability,” said Rosemary Batt, author of the new article and the Alice Hanson Cook Professor of Women and Work at the ILR School, Cornell University.
“Who benefits from the cost savings? In the current system, there are too many incentives for hospitals and healthcare companies, as well as opportunistic financial actors such as private equity and venture capital firms, to make money while leaving patients, families, and taxpayers to bear the costs,” said Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Congress and the CMS must establish a research program to identify best practices and measure their outcomes. Based on this research, appropriate skills and training standards, patient care metrics, and reporting and monitoring systems must be put in place; and cost-sharing standards must be developed so that hospital-at-home programs actually save money while delivering high quality care.
The new article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1093/ppar/prad004
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