So are you an inpatient or an outpatient?

The hospital and Medicare get to decide. Not your doctor who is actually treating you.I found this pretty appalling. Medicare patients can be in the hospital for DAYS and be called and an outpatient because they are only being 'observed'. They get the same care as everyone else. But then they get a big fat bill if they were an outpatient.Their doctor can even admit them and make them an inpatient but then the hospital can change it back to outpatient. Hospitals like this because they get reimbursed more that way."Medicare originally intended observation care as a way to give doctors time to evaluate whether a patient should be admitted to the hospital or is stable enough to go home, usually within 24 to 48 hours. But hospitals are increasingly keeping patients in observation status longer: 8 percent of Medicare recipients had observation stays longer than 48 hours in 2011, up from 3 percent in 2006. Apparently the government can tell by looking at a rule book to figure out how sick you are, not but diagnosing you and reading your chart. Or, God forbid, even talking to you.That increase may partly be a response to aggressive reviews of hospital billing practices in recent years. Medicare contractors have demanded refunds from hospitals that admit patients the government believes should have been treated as observation patients or outpatients. Medicare pays hospitals less for those patients."And also hospitals are now rated on their readmission rates. If you aren't a...
Source: Caroline's Breast Cancer Blog - Category: Cancer Tags: medical care hospital health insurance medical costs Source Type: blogs