How To Remedy Being Discharged From A Hospital Prematurely As A Medicare Patient?
Perhaps you have an individual within your family who has been hospitalized, though they will be discharged rather soon. What does one do in this situation? Maybe you’re not sure about assisted living, home health care, or even nursing facilities. Chances are you didn’t even know that the person would be released from the hospital in such a short amount of time.
About this time you begin to scramble about, looking for the right thing to do. Most likely the hospital will provide you a list of rehab clinics, but they won’t make the decision for you. You might feel as if you are being rushed along, and therefore you find it necessary to make a quick decision. Fortunately, you don’t have to rush at all.
Medicare is a health insurance plan that is sanctioned by the government. This means that Congress is actually putting pressure on them. One of the best ways for them to save money is by discharging patients way too early. Hospitals are required to provide a Notice of Noncoverage. This notice indicates that a hospital MUST give you three days of warning before a patient can be discharged from the hospital.
If you have not been given such a notice, make it your personal mission to ensure that you do. Sure they might play dumb or even deny you at first, but if you keep insisting, they will give you the time you need. It might seem inconvenient and rude, but the person you love is in the hospital, and you need to make sure that they get the care they need. This involves you making the right decision.
You’re going to find out that hospitals love to discharge their Medicare patients earlier than they should. During the last forty years, the average hospital stay for seniors has gone from about fourteen days to six days. If the hospital has it’s way, this number will simply keep dropping.
The main problem is he fixed fee system that Medicare has in place for hospitals. Hospitals get the same fee for each patient, independently from the severity of their health condition. If a patient stays longer, the extra cost has to be paid by the hospital. So the shorted their stay, the more money the hospital makes.
When it comes to this policy, care is the last thing on their minds. More likely they are thinking about money. Now when you enter a hospital, you sign a paper. This paper acknowledges your rights as a patient, and one of those rights is the right to not be discharged early. Make sure you copy the document entitled: “An Important Message From Medicare — Your Rights While You Are A Medicare Hospital Patient.”.
One of those rights is your right to get that “Notice of Noncoverage”. If you have this, then the hospital will not be able to discharge you until the standard three days are up, and they cannot charge you for the service. If you have not received that note yet, then you can stay in the hospital with your medicare plan.
If you wish, you can appeal the hospital’s decision simply by writing or calling the PRO in charge of filing the appeals for Medicare. Now you want to make sure that you do this rather quickly because these claims take a while to process. Know your rights, and don’t feel bad about complaining!
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