Harold Engler recently spent 10 days in a Boston teaching hospital, trying to snap back from complications after urgent hernia surgery. Nurses provided around-the-clock treatment, changing the 91-year-old’s catheter, for example, and pumping him with intravenous drugs for suspected pneumonia.
It all seemed like textbook hospital care to his wife, Sylvia. So she was shocked to learn that Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center had never “admitted” her husband at all.
That's strange. It must be because they are admitting patients over at the clinic.
“Mrs. Engler, we have bad news for you. This was marked ‘medical observation,’ ” said a nurse at the nursing home where her husband was sent for rehabilitation. The hospital had decided Harold Engler was not sick enough to qualify as an official “inpatient.”
The difference in terminology was not a mere technicality: the observation classification left the Englers with a huge bill. It triggered a mystifying Medicare rule that required the Framingham couple to pay the entire $7,859 cost of his rehabilitation care and the medications he needed while at the nursing facility. If Harold Engler, a retired sales executive, had been admitted to the hospital, they would have likely paid nothing.
As Engler doubles over again.
It is a striking example of just how impenetrable the US health care system can be for those who use it.
Isn't that a SAD, SAD STATEMENT on the BEST HEALTH CARE $Y$TEM in the WORLD?!
Thousands of Medicare enrollees in Massachusetts and across the country are finding themselves caught in the same perplexing bind....
I think it is part of Obama's Medicare cuts of $500 billion. Has to be.
Hospitals say it’s not their fault....
Medicare officials said they could not comment....
They don't tell you anything in this damn hospital!
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