The final rule for changes to the hospital inpatient acute care prospective payment system (PPS) for federal fiscal year 2012 was released by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in early August. This release included two changes related to the amount of defined benefit pension costs a hospital is allowed to claim on its Medicare cost report. One of the changes relates to calculating allowable pension costs claimed on a PPS hospital’s wage index.
On August 1, 2011, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) published the final rule for changes to the hospital acute care prospective payment system (PPS) for federal fiscal year (FY) 2012. As was discussed in a prior BKD article on this topic, CMS included several changes affecting the hospital wage index computation for FY 2013