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Medicare Advantage Benefits in 2022 Target Home as a Setting, Diabetes as a Condition
Home Health Care News
Medicare Advantage (MA) supplemental benefits adoption has been slow by some measures and rapid by others.
A new report from the consulting firm Milliman offers a look into that dynamic and shows exactly where each of those benefits stands in 2022.
Among the primarily-health related benefits, in-home support services (IHSS) remains the most popular benefit by a large margin. Meanwhile, adult day service offerings have actually fallen off from 2021.
As for the Special Supplemental Benefits for the Chronically Ill (SSBCI), the services that home care agencies can provide also remain the most popular. Those include the food and produce, meals beyond a limited basis, non-medical transportation and general supports for living offerings.
IHSS can be offered through both the primarily-health related and SSBCI pathways. The benefit has seen significant uptick over the last couple years. Now, 544 plans are offering it, a 268% increase from the 148 plans that offered IHSS in 2020.
“That’s really significant growth from when this was first available as a benefit,” Tyler Cromer, a principal for ATI Advisory, told Home Health Care News when initial MA benefits data for 2022 was first released. “There’s a lot of good news here for home care providers.”
As for adult day services, it’s drop in popularity among plans could be due to a few reasons. In 2021, 88 plans offered the benefit, up from 63 in 2020. But in 2022, just 42 plans are on board with the benefit.
Adult day services were hit hard by COVID-19 over the past two years. For long periods of time, operators in a lot of states were not even allowed to open and struggled to stay afloat.
Additionally, because MA plans are still experimenting with supplemental benefits, the amount of hours they pay for – for any given service – is sometimes meager. With that in mind, the benefit may not be worth it right now for either side – provider or MA plan.
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Americans Can Order More COVID Tests from the Government Starting this Week
President Joe Biden announced during last week’s State of the Union address, that Americans will be able to order an additional set of 4 COVID-19 test kits for free from covidtests.gov beginning this week.
"Even if you already ordered free tests, tonight, I am announcing that you can order more from covidtests.gov starting next week," Biden said. |
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Revised physical therapy guidelines, new subvariant, link between long COVID and type 2 diabetes, and more. |
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"Are we going to let another opportunity to improve societal health become ephemeral? Or are we going to move forward and lean into a problem facing health care that’s been waiting for a profession like ours to take on?" |
Interim Clinical Considerations for Use of COVID-19 Vaccines Currently Approved or Authorized in the United States
The CDC has updated the Interim Clinical Considerations for Use of COVID-19 Vaccines Currently Approved or Authorized in the United States to indicate that the second dose of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines may be given up to 8 weeks after the first dose.
The rationale for this change is that "Some studies in adolescents (ages 12-17 years) and adults have shown the small risk of myocarditis associated with mRNA COVID-19 vaccines might be reduced and peak antibody responses and vaccine effectiveness may be increased with an interval longer than 4 weeks." They also say that "an 8-week interval may be optimal for some people ages 12 years and older, especially for males ages 12 to 39 years."
A 3-week interval for Pfizer and a 4-week interval for Moderna continue to be recommended for people who are moderately to severely immunocompromised, adults ages 65 years and older, and others who need rapid protection due to increased concern about community transmission or risk of severe disease. |
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