Reminder: nursing facilities must give a 30-day notice by September 1 of a rate change to their private paying residents — that is right around the corner! You may have noted that the August 15 deadline has come and gone but there isn’t a rate notice for the October 1, 2011, rate year on the Department of Human Services (DHS) Provider Portal — the shutdown has slowed down their processes there. Here is the most recent message from DHS on rate notices:

Here are the changes we are implementing in the programming:

Equitable Cost-sharing for Publically-owned Nursing facilities (ECPN)
If you are unfamiliar with this program, it allows nursing facilities that are owned by a city, county, or hospital district to choose an operating rate anywhere from their current rate up to their full cost-based rate as computed under the rebasing statute (MS 256B.441). To compute their full cost-based rate we need to compute all the cost-based rates because there are limits determined based on a percentage of the median rate.

Increase for nursing facilities with low rates
The legislative session passed a law to allow all facilities below a certain operating rate to have an increase to their operating rates of 2.45%. The target rate is the DDF rate at the 18th percentile of all facility DDF rates (DDF is the default rate with a case-mix weighting of 1.00). The rate increase can be less than 2.45% to prevent an increase that exceeds the 18th percentile target rate.

Property rates
This change is easy to program. The law was changed to take away the property inflation this year and next year.

Long-Term Care Consultation fee (LTCC)
There is an increase that must be paid to the counties by the nursing facilities. We are waiting for some information to compute how much more each county — and therefore each facility — is to receive.

There were other changes made in law this year. We will be publishing a bulletin detailing them soon. We have set a goal of getting rate notices completed by the end of the month. Please remember that private-paying residents must be given a 30-day notice by September 1 of a rate change. All facilities will have a rate change because of LTCC change noted above. The notice to private-pay does not need to state the amount of the change, just that there will be one.

Patti Cullen, CAE
952.851.2487
pcullen@careproviders.org

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