With the moratorium on the 2% Medicare sequester cuts currently set to expire on March 31, AAHomecare and our healthcare sector coalition partners have redoubled efforts to engage legislators in support of extending the pause on these cuts.
As a result of this outreach, an updated bill that would extend the moratorium throughout the end of 2021 may be introduced as early as this week.
The new measure is expected to also waive further potential Medicare cuts, starting in FY 2022, stemming from the application of 2010 Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) legislation that triggers automatic cuts across a range of Federal programs to cover deficit spending increases – in this case, red ink incurred via the recent $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package. Under the current scenario, the broadly applied Medicare cut for healthcare providers would be 4%. More details on the mechanics of the PAYGO cuts are explained in this recent Bloomberg article.
Please ask your legislators to support efforts to extend the Medicare sequester moratorium until the end of the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency and waive the punitive PAYGO requirements. Please see our blog post for a simple message you can email House and Senate healthcare staffers on the issue.
You can also send a message to your legislators through our Action Center in support of legislation to address these cuts (adding to the 6,000+ messages sent to Capitol Hill on this issue so far), but a personal email to a staffer who handles healthcare issues will have considerably stronger and quicker impact.
Please contact Gordon Barnes at gordonb@aahomecare.org if you need contact information for Congressional healthcare staffers. If you have any questions on the issue, contact Gordon or Kam Yuricich at kam@oames.org in the OAMES office.