Yet another study suggests that Medicare Advantage (MA) beneficiaries have less access to quality home health services.
In a study comparing traditional Medicare beneficiaries and MA beneficiaries in 2019, traditional Medicare beneficiaries were more likely to utilize outpatient, inpatient and home health care services than beneficiaries in MA plans.
That was the case regardless of whether the MA plan had a monthly premium or not.
“When you’re talking about traditional Medicare versus MA of all types, you don’t have as many barriers to entry,” Research Institute for Home Care Executive Director Jennifer Schiller told Home Health Care News. “There aren’t the barriers to access in traditional Medicare – to get home home health care, to get inpatient care, to get outpatient care – as there are with Medicare Advantage plans.”
The Research Institute for Home Care (RIHC) funds research related to home-based care delivery. It recently published research around hospital-to-home transitions.
Its latest published research is centered around MA beneficiaries of all plan types, as well as comparisons between traditional beneficiaries and their MA member counterparts.
Home health care, in general, tends to be preferable to brick-and-mortar post-acute care – when appropriate. Patients prefer it, and it saves health systems money, given that it’s less expensive.
MA plans tend to pay less for home health services than traditional Medicare, which has become increasingly cumbersome for providers as MA penetration has continued over the years.
“At first, if you just look at traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage patients, they may look similar,” Schiller said. “But when you break it down, … there’s a bigger story to be told.”
The researchers used the 2019 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MSBS) Cost Supplement, which is “a nationally representative sample of Medicare beneficiaries.”
Disparities between utilization in MA members and traditional Medicare beneficiaries have been confirmed elsewhere, including in a study published by researchers with the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at University of Washington earlier this year.
Schiller noted a few caveats given the study’s focus year.
“This provides an important baseline,” she said. “But obviously, a few things have happened since 2019. We’ve had COVID-19, we’ve had the Patient-Driven Groupings Model (PDGM) and we’ve also had an increase in Medicare Advantage penetration, right? So there are additional factors to consider.”
RIHC plans on delving into more recent data as it becomes available.
Companies featured in this article:
