Saving our Seniors Thousands for Skilled Nursing Care

Republished from: https://iqconnect.lmhostediq.com/iqextranet/view_newsletter.aspx?id=278376&c=CT02JC

By Joe Courtney, Member of Congress (D-CT)

On Tuesday, I joined my colleagues Congressman Glenn ‘GT’ Thompson (R-PA) and Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) to reintroduce the Improving Access to Medicare Coverage Act of 2019, a bipartisan and bicameral bill to fix an arbitrary Medicare policy that excludes coverage of skilled nursing care for seniors, who can end up facing thousands upon thousands of dollars in unexpected, out-of-pocket costs for care that was professionally prescribed. Medicare policy requires patients to spend three days as an “inpatient” in order to qualify for Medicare coverage of skilled home nursing care after they leave the hospital. However, for thousands of patients who are classified arbitrarily as “under observation” while they’re in the hospital, Medicare won’t cover their nursing home care, even if they stay for the requisite three days. This gap in coverage is a crisis waiting to happen for so many families in eastern Connecticut and across the country. Whether a patient is in the hospital for three days as an inpatient or for three days under observation status, semantics should not keep Medicare recipients from accessing the care they’ve been prescribed by health care professionals, or force them to go into medical debt in order to cover the cost.