FL - Dennis Heide

We are a clinician owned home health agency providing patient centered care. That means we don't adjust our care based on reimbursement. This leads to many cases in which we lose money but our care is second to none. Now, with these changes, you are forcing us to "play your game" of decreasing benefits to patients just so we can survive. It is a sad day to me as a clinician, when we have to treat elderly differently because politicians think preventing fraud means cutting costs and piling on regulatory hoops we have to jump through. I currently have as many employees in my compliance department as I do field nurses who actually provide care. How is that right? Now, you want to accelerate cuts and decrease our market basket increase and force us out of business when home care is the answer to our high health care costs. Please explain this to me? Being a small agency, we end up accepting difficult cases the Hospital based agencies refuse. It takes more man power to care for them with less profit and often no profit. Who is going to care for these most needy cases when we are forced out by these cuts? All you are accomplishing by these cuts is forcing your best clinicians out of the industry and you will end up with a few big national companies who have enough capital to survive. Then, you will have businessmen making clinical decisions for you and your loved ones. If that is what you want then continue with home care cuts. If you want home care to be provided by the best clinicians practicing patient first medicine, then reverse these cuts and reconsider where our health care should turn to be both high quality and affordable.