WASHINGTON – A fight to repeal a 15 percent cut to home health care services for the elderly previously approved by Congress won its first victory Thursday with the Senate Budget Committee unanimously voting to support the effort.

The committee’s action comes after Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, rallied 64 senators to sign a bipartisan letter to the committee in which they argued that additional cuts to the program would be devastating to Medicare patients who need financial assistance to pay for home visits from health care professionals.

“I was hopeful that when members of the committee looked at the facts, they would see that allowing this cut to go forward as scheduled would do untold harm to hundreds of thousands of elderly Americans who rely on home health care,” said Collins, a member of the Senate Special Committee on Aging.

The scheduled 15 percent reduction was intended to help curb spending growth under Medicare and pressure the health care industry to develop more cost-efficient services – but critics say the cut has gone too far. Between 1998 and 2000, the program suffered nearly $8 billion in cuts – a 49 percent decrease over 1997.

Earlier in the day, Collins joined a news conference to unveil a study by the Polisher Institute that found such cuts exacerbate access and quality concerns for vulnerable Medicare patients.

According to the report, nearly 4,000 home health agencies have either closed or stopped serving elderly patients in their homes since 1997. During the years between 1997 and 1999 alone, that meant the program served 800,000 fewer homebound patients.

In Maine, the number of Medicare home health patients dropped from 48,749 in June 1998 to 37,545 in March 2000 – a decline of 23 percent, according to Collins spokeswoman Felicia Knight. There also was a 40 percent drop in the number of visits and a 31 percent cut in Medicare payments to home health agencies in Maine.

Any further cuts would be unacceptable, Collins said.

“An additional 15 percent cut in Medicare home health payments would be the absolute death knell for the low-cost, efficient providers who are currently struggling to hang on and would further reduce seniors’ access to critical home care services,” she said.

Over the past five years Collins has been working to repeal the 15 percent cut, which Congress first approved in the 1997 Balanced Budget Act. Last year, she and Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., successfully convinced the Senate to overwhelmingly approve a resolution to establish a $13.7 billion reserve fund that could be used only to eliminate the 15 percent cut.