Skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) will see their Medicare payments increase next year under a final rule published this week by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
In fiscal year 2014, aggregate payments to SNFs are expected to increase by $470 million, or about 1.3%, compared to FY 2013, according to a cost summary by CMS.
The updated rule is slightly less than what CMS had proposed in May, where the agency called for a 1.4% payment increase that would in turn raise SNF payments to approximately $500 million.
CMS based its final rule on a marketbasket update of 2.3% to SNFs, and while the agency projects that all providers would experience a net increase in payments, some individual providers may experience different impacts on payments than others.
For example, SNFs in rural locations look to experience the largest payment hikes, according to CMS estimations.
In FY 2014, SNFs in urban and rural areas would experience, on average, a 1.4% and 1.0% increase in estimated payments compared with FY 2013.
Additionally, CMS notes that providers in the rural Pacific region would experience the largest estimated increase in payments of approximately 2.8%, whereas providers in the rural West South Central region would have the smallest increase in payments of 0.4%, respectively.
Written by Jason Oliva
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