HHS Reshaping Health Care – Including Managed Care and HCBS Settings Rule

Media reports are confirming that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and its Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) are reexamining existing regulations and how to ensure there is more state flexibility and less regulatory burden inserted. Two rules that are front and center for CMS are the Medicaid managed care rule and the HCBS Settings Rule.

“While Congress tussles over Obamacare, the Trump administration is quietly pressing ahead with plans to gut major Obama-era rules and relax federal oversight of swaths of the health care industry. […]

Two of the agencies’ most ambitious projects are still in the works: a rewrite of a 2016 rule that updated federal requirements for Medicaid managed-care plans for the first time in over a decade, and a similarly sweeping 2014 rule tightening oversight of residential care facilities, including those for adults with disabilities. […]

Changes to the regulation regarding residential care facilities, known as the Home and Community-Based Services rule, could potentially have ripple effects, according to people familiar with the agency’s discussions. A rewrite is likely to focus on easing the federal standards for facilities that care for disabled adults and shifting more oversight responsibility back to the states.

That would represent a sharp reversal from the Obama era, which sought to toughen federal regulation over concerns about abuse and subpar living conditions in homelike facilities for the disabled.”

Read the full article here.