Sponsors
This bill increases funding and oversight for hospice care—boosting payments, expanding some covered services, and tightening fraud controls—while imposing moratoria, new administrative burdens, and fiscal pressures that may restrict provider entry, complicate operations, and shift who benefits.
Medicare hospice patients will receive substantially higher per‑day payments for certain routine home hospice services, increasing resources for in‑home end‑of‑life care.
Hospice oversight, audit accuracy, and payment transparency are strengthened through more frequent surveys, ownership reporting, audit/technical expert panels, and public reporting—helping detect and deter improper payments and improve cap calculations.
Medicare beneficiaries face lower risk of fraud and inappropriate hospice enrollments because of a targeted 5‑year moratorium and enhanced prepayment reviews focused on high‑risk providers.
New hospice programs and some applicants can be barred from enrolling for up to five years, reducing provider choice and potentially limiting patient access in affected markets.
Higher hospice payments (including a temporary large per‑day boost) will increase Medicare Part A spending and add fiscal pressure to Medicare finances, potentially affecting taxpayers and program sustainability.
Hospice providers and CMS will face substantial administrative and compliance burdens from mandatory revalidation, ownership reporting, enhanced surveys, complex new payment formulas, and system updates.
Based on analysis of 3 sections of legislative text.
Imposes a 5‑year nationwide moratorium on new Medicare hospice program enrollments, strengthens enrollment controls and reviews, and changes hospice payment rules including a temporary higher per‑day payment (2027–2032).
Introduced March 17, 2026 by Mark R. Warner · Last progress March 17, 2026
Creates a nationwide, temporary 5-year moratorium on new Medicare enrollments for hospice programs and sets strict enrollment controls, data reporting, and prepayment review for high‑risk providers. It also changes how hospice payments are set each year, defines routine home‑care payment rules going forward, and creates a temporary elevated per‑day payment for certain routine home hospice services from Oct 1, 2027 through Sept 30, 2032.