Seniors Sue Medicare To Close Nursing Home Coverage Gap
…Today, lawyers representing 14 seniors, including 7 from Connecticut, will go to 
U.S. District Court in Hartford to ask a judge to eliminate the observation care designation because it deprives Medicare beneficiaries of the full hospital coverage they’re entitled to under Medicare, including coverage for follow-up nursing home care. More seniors are falling into the observation care coverage gap: the number of observation patients has skyrocketed 69 percent in the past five years, to 1.6 million nationally in 2011, according federal records.
Government lawyers will ask the judge to throw out the case because the seniors should have followed Medicare’s appeals process before going to court if they believed they were unfairly denied benefits.
And yet federal records and interviews with patients and advocates show that many observation patients who call Medicare about the billing problem hear something quite different – there is nothing that Medicare can do to help. MORE