The Alliance of Safety-Net Hospitals has submitted formal comments to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in response to that agency’s proposed FY 2026 Medicare inpatient prospective payment system regulation, which calls for changes in how Medicare will pay hospitals for inpatient care and regulate some aspects of hospitals’ operations in the coming year.
Among its recommendations, ASH calls on CMS to:
- Establish a one-time payment adjustment of 4.3 percent, over and above its proposed 2.4 hospital inpatient payment increase, to offset hospital losses suffered over the past four years as a result of rate increases that failed to reflect the rising cost of providing inpatient care.
- Increase the labor-related share of Medicare payments from the proposed 66 percent to 70 percent.
- Commit to reconsidering and possibly increasing its proposed $1.5 billion increase in the Medicare disproportionate share (Medicare DSH) uncompensated care pool if Medicaid aspects of the budget reconciliation bill currently being considered by Congress are enacted and result in a meaningful increase in the number of uninsured Americans, which would quickly increase hospitals’ uncompensated care costs and have a serious and especially damaging impact on community safety-net hospitals.
- Make participation in the Transforming Episode Accountability Model (TEAM) voluntary and establish a low-volume threshold so that participating hospitals that do not perform a meaningful number of some of the types of cases included in the model are not penalized for failing to reduce costs when they do not have an opportunity to perform enough of some procedures to find ways to reduce their costs.
Learn more from ASH’s letter to CMS conveying its comments on the proposed FY 2026 inpatient prospective payment system regulation.
