While Medicare covers emergency room care, unless your father was admitted to the hospital as an inpatient, Medicare Part A may not have covered his hospital stay. If emergency room doctors held your dad "under observation" or as an "outpatient," then his stay was covered under Medicare Part B, and there may have been expensive bills for that hospital stay depending on what other type of insurance your dad had in addition to Medicare. In addition, Medicare has strict rules about the length of stays in the hospital, in order to qualify for limited nursing home coverage for rehabilitation. Medicare does not cover most long - term stays in nursing homes..What are budget cutters looking at? Here are a few key proposals under discussion. After reviewing these, tell us what you think by taking our survey..We strongly recommend that you call your dad's health plan and ask for a detailed statement including dates of stays and services billed. Keep careful notes of your call. If you are still unsatisfied, you can get free one-on-one counseling through your state health insurance assistance programs that may be able to help you determine what costs should have been covered and whether you should appeal the charges. Find a program in your area here..This week, one new cosponsor Rep. John Fleming signed on to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher's No Social Security for Illegal Immigrants Act. The total is now up to twenty-four. If signed into law, Rep. Rohrabacher's bill would prevent Social Security credits from being earned by work done illegally. Currently, those who receive "green cards" or work authorization may file a claim for Social Security benefits based on all earnings even earnings from jobs where they used stolen, invalid, or fraudulent Social Security numbers. TSCL believes that this practice must be put to an end in order to protect the integrity of the Social Security program, and we were pleased to see support grow for it this week..During the meetings, the following issues were discussed: Social Security cost-of-living adjustments, Social Security Notch fairness, Social Security Totalization agreement reform, Social Security credits earned for work done illegally, and repeal of both the windfall elimination provision and the government pension offset. Support was expressed for many of these key issues, and TSCL looks forward to working with these offices in the future..Hospitals, which are often the biggest employers in their localities, or even their states, have furloughed workers, and the industry lost an estimated billion a month in foregone surgeries and procedures during the worst part of the pandemic. Hospitals rely on elective surgeries for a major portion of their revenue, because Medicare and private insurers tend to pay more for those procedures than other types of hospital care. Hospitals say they also have lost money in treating COVID-19, because of the amount of intensive care that patients need..President Obama signed it into law shortly thereafter, saying it will improve the Medicare program "because it starts encouraging payments based on quality, not the number of tests that are provided or the number of procedures that are applied, but whether or not people actually start feeling better." The law took effect immediately, and upon the bill's signing, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that it had already begun reimbursing physicians at the full payment rate..In the coming weeks, we will continue to advocate for the legislation in the Senate, where the bill now sits. We will post updates here in the Legislative News section of our website, and on our new page on Facebook..In addition, it would close Medicare Part D's "doughnut hole" two years earlier than under current law, and it would require drug manufacturers to provide new rebates to low-income beneficiaries. If adopted, the plan would also increase transparency in the prescription drug market by requiring manufacturers to publicly disclose the costs of research and development, discounts, and other data that determines drug pricing. In an attempt to increase competition within the drug market, it would also prohibit anti-competitive deals, reduce the period of market exclusivity for brand-name manufacturers from twelve years to seven, and eliminate rules that extend market exclusivity when manufacturers make minor changes to products.
