Kaiser Health News: Medicare Patients Win the Right to Appeal Gap in Nursing Home Coverage (January 28, 2022)

A three-judge federal appeals court panel in Connecticut has likely ended an 11-year fight against a frustrating and confusing rule that left hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries without coverage for nursing home care, and no way to challenge a denial.

The Jan. 25 ruling, which came in response to a 2011 class-action lawsuit eventually joined by 14 beneficiaries against the Department of Health and Human Services, will guarantee patients the right to appeal to Medicare for nursing home coverage if they were admitted to a hospital as an inpatient but were switched to observation care, an outpatient service.

“You can appeal almost every issue affecting your Medicare coverage except this one, and that is unfair,” said Alice Bers, litigation director at the Center for Medicare Advocacy, which represented the patients in their lawsuit along with Justice in Aging, another advocacy group, and the California law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati.