Political Quotes

“I want to, first of all, salute Congressman Doggett for his effort in terms of bringing this legislation forward. As the chairman of the committee said, this is really about giving patients a fighting chance to challenge this coding, a change that happens while people are in the hospital and have absolutely no idea that they are not being treated as full part A inpatient patients at hospital facilities. The impact of being coded as observation versus inpatient may sound extremely arcane, but what that means is that at time of discharge, if a patient is medically prescribed to go to a nursing home for rehab care for a broken bone or for home health services for a heart condition, they are not covered by Medicare if they are in the observation bucket as opposed to the inpatient bucket. The inspector general's office for Medicare issued a report in 2012 that 600,000 patients across the country with long-stay hospital visits over 3 days fell into this black hole, this no man's land where, again, their doctors are telling them that they need to have rehab services so that people can walk again and deal with activities of daily living; but the price for doing that, because you are in observation status, can be tens of thousands of dollars, which is where long-term care facilities, nursing home coverage for private-pay patients, out-of- pocket patients, exist today. This bill at least gives patients the opportunity to challenge that decision.…”