Everything the Corrections Fixed That Wasn't a Rate
Five FY 2027 rate books were corrected in three days, and the rate changes were the small part: one of those documents fixed a day-one payment factor that three straight final rules printed wrong, worth $9.12 on every psychiatric admission. Also this week, a Federal Register notice whose entire content is a link CMS forgot, a hospice condition of payment that started Thursday on a ninety-day grace period, and UnitedHealthcare's October clock.
In the summer of 2024, CMS showed its work on the inpatient psychiatric emergency department adjustment.
Divide the average ED cost per stay, $519.97, by the average cost per day, $1,338.93, and you get 0.39. Multiply by the 66 percent of cases actually admitted through the ED and you get 0.26.
Then step three, at 89 FR 64636, verbatim: "the first day payment factor for FY 2025 is 1.28. Adding 0.26, we obtained a first day variable per adjustment for IPFs with a qualifying ED equal to 1.54."
On the page before it, the same rule said facilities without a qualifying ED get 1.27.
That sentence ran again in the FY 2026 final rule, and a third time in the FY 2027 final rule at 91 FR 48529. On Thursday, in a correcting document effective the same day it published, CMS fixed it.
Five corrections landed between Tuesday and Thursday and every one of them will get filed under "rates." The first item below is the one that isn't, and it is worth $9.12 an admission (chart below).
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The impact tables, the code-level detail, and the rest of the analysis sit past this line.
$50 a month, or $500 a year.
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