Senate Finance Committee Chair Charles Grassley (R-IA) is floating a plan to reduce Medicare payments – instead of making wide cuts to Medicaid.
The amount of bad debt nursing homes could write off would fall from 100% to 75% under one point of the proposal. Grassley estimates that alone would yield an estimated $500 million in savings.
Grassley’s plan is to reduce mandatory spending by $12 billion over five years. This amount is $2 billion more than the cuts a Medicaid committee was required to come up with as part of the fiscal year 2006 budget resolution.
Other proposals up for consideration are freezing the home healthcare marketbasket, eliminating the incentive fund for insurers who participate in the Medicare prescription drug plan, and the creation of pay-for-performance guidelines for Medicare providers.
Grassley also supports tightening asset-transfer regulations by would-be Medicaid beneficiaries. Such tightening could yield a projected savings of $1.5 billion to $2 billion, he says.