Sherrod Brown: “last year I introduced modest legislation that would allow seniors in managed care plans to return after a…”

“last year I introduced modest legislation that would allow seniors in managed care plans to return after a hospitalization to the retirement community they know, instead of a network HMO nursing home somewhere else. I offered the Right to Go Home Act on behalf of seniors who had been needlessly separated because of HMO rules from their loved ones and from their usual source of care. It is difficult to believe a health plan would treat a hospitalized senior this way, until you speak to Medicare+Choice enrollees, privatized Medicare, if you will, who experienced it firsthand. Take, for example, a couple in New Hampshire, separated after the husband's hospitalization because the HMO required him to be discharged to a nursing home in Maine, a 40 minute drive from the community where he and his wife had lived. Or a couple in Florida separated when their HMO required the wife to recuperate from a hospital stay in a nursing home 20 miles away from the retirement community. The husband had difficulty visiting her, and she died later at the HMO member facility. A retirement community, a nursing facility, is more than just a health care provider; it is a home. Forced relocation means moving vulnerable patients, taking them away from providers experienced in these individual's chronic care needs. It places them in new, strange surroundings during that fragile period of recovery. It separates them from emotionally supportive family and friends.”