Department of Health and Human Services April 15, 2021 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

The Office of Population Affairs (OPA), in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, proposes to revise the rules issued on March 4, 2019, establishing standards for compliance by family planning services projects authorized by Title X of the Public Health Service Act. Those rules have undermined the public health of the population the program is meant to serve. The Department proposes to revise the 2019 rules by readopting the 2000 regulations, with several modifications needed to strengthen the program and ensure access to equitable, affordable, client-centered, quality family planning services for all clients, especially for low-income clients.

This proposed rule would update the payment rates used under the prospective payment system (PPS) for skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) for fiscal year (FY) 2022. In addition, the proposed rule includes a proposed forecast error adjustment for FY 2022, proposes updates to the diagnosis code mappings used under the Patient Driven Payment Model (PDPM), proposes to rebase and revise the SNF market basket, proposes to implement a recently-enacted SNF consolidated billing exclusion along with the required proportional reduction in the SNF PPS base rates, and includes a discussion of a methodology to recalibrate the PDPM parity adjustment. In addition, the proposed rule includes proposals for the SNF Quality Reporting Program (QRP) and the SNF Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) Program, including a proposal to suppress the use of the SNF readmission measure for scoring and payment adjustment purposes in the FY 2022 SNF VBP program because we have determined that circumstances caused by the public health emergency for COVID-19 have significantly affected the validity and reliability of the measure and resulting performance scores.