Medicaid

Many Medicare beneficiaries are being transferred to nursing homes only to find that because they were hospital outpatients all along, they must pick up the tab for the subsequent nursing home stay -- Medicare will pay none of it. 

The new law, the Notice of Observation Treatment and Implication for Care Eligibility (NOTICE) Act, does not eliminate the practice of placing patients under “observation” for extended periods, but it does require hospitals to notify patients who are under observation for more than 24 hours of their outpatient status within 36 hours, or upon discharge if that occurs sooner. Read more.

One component of the Affordable Care Act is to increase access to health insurance by expanding eligibility for Medicaid benefits. The Medicaid program provides health insurance coverage to people with low incomes and is funded jointly by the federal and state governments.  This report offers a clear explanation of the act in terms of Medicaid expansion.

http://www.kff.org/healthreform/upload/8332.pdf

By JANET ADAMY And NEIL KING JR.

Huge budget shortfalls are prompting a handful of states to begin discussing a once-unthinkable scenario: dropping out of the Medicaid insurance program for the poor.

Elected and appointed officials in nearly a half-dozen states, including Washington, Texas and South Carolina, have publicly thrown out the idea. Wyoming and Nevada this year produced detailed studies of what would happen should they withdraw from the program. Wyoming found that Medicaid accounts for 63% of the state's nursing-home revenue.

The idea of abandoning Medicaid as a solution is so extreme that even proponents don't expect any state will follow through, but officials are floating the discussions because dire budgetary pressures have forced them to at least look at even the most drastic options.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704444304575628603406482936.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsForth