[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Article Analysis
The home health-care industry has grown significantly in the past decade, helping many of the disabled elderly remain in the community rather than in a nursing home. The home, nevertheless, has long been the primary site where most care for persons with long-term illnesses takes place. Principally female members of the family receiving no remuneration for their services have provided the care. Only the wealthy could rely on hired personnel for long-term custodial and health care services. Medicare compensation has expanded such care to a much larger segment of the population. For-profit home health care agencies and equipment manufacturers have grown to take advantage of new Medicare regulations and technological innovations.
The speed of the increase in Medicare costs since 1990 in turn gave rise to fear about fraud and abuse, which ended with reduction in home care expenditures authorized by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Since Medicare and Medicaid pay more than half of the home health care bills in the United States, the whole industry has later been forced to make adjustments.
As has been the case in other areas of health service delivery, the system is shifting from compensations for services made toward one with fixed payments based on the patient’s diagnosis or the case load assumed by the home health agency. Regulations in place now are in place temporarily until a full likely payment system can be developed. The temporary regulations have been recognized to have a number of regrettable and unintentional consequences: Home health agencies that had very high charges in the recent past will face less difficulty than will agencies that had a track record of trying to more strictly contain their costs. Smaller agencies may be predominantly likely to go out of business due to the added requirement of surety bonds of $50,000......
