Medicare Consulting

DeBrunner & Associates stays abreast of all Medicare developments – often, before they even become "official" developments. We provide advice regarding the implications of proposed legislation and regulations for our clients, the likelihood of their adoption, and the possibility of successfully opposing those that pose problems. At the same time, we also look for opportunities to advocate proposals that would benefit our clients. Throughout such efforts, we work closely with our clients’ members of Congress, officials at CMS, and others and frequently have engaged in successful advocacy in support of or in opposition to newly proposed legislation or regulations, securing critical changes in both.

Our Medicare consulting encompasses a broad range of policy areas, including area wage index reclassifications, medical education payments, provider eligibility issues, changes in provider designation types (critical access, Medicare-dependent, sole-community), participation in demonstration and grant programs, meeting the criteria to gain supplemental IT funding, geographic variation payments, new requirements dictated by the 2010 health care reform law, and more.

This year, DeBrunner & Associates is adding a new service: helping hospitals with their uncompensated care accounting. Under the new health care reform law, hospitals eligible for Medicare DSH will see those payments fall by as much as 75 percent beginning in 2014. How much they fall will depend on how much uncompensated care hospitals provide and how they account for that uncompensated care on Medicare’s new S-10 forms, with the first set of reductions to be based on Medicare cost reports and S-10 forms filed in 2010 and 2011. DeBrunner & Associates helps hospitals review the data reporting requirements and structure their reporting in a manner that helps maximize their reported uncompensated care, thereby minimizing their loss of vital Medicare DSH revenue.