Zoom-boing
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"At the extreme, this benefit can turn into a long-term care social support system," said commission chairman Glenn Hackbarth. "A modest copayment is one tool to help deal with that problem."
The advice comes as lawmakers face a tough budget year. A sluggish economy and tax cuts are draining revenue while deficits soar to ranges widely seen as unsustainable. Republicans won control of the House on a promise to curb spending, yet there's little hope of that unless Congress and the president can agree on ways to restrain health care costs.
More than 3 million seniors and disabled people on Medicare use home health services — visits from nurses, personal care attendants and therapists, available to those who can't easily get out of the house.
Home health was once seen as a cost saver, since it's clearly cheaper than admitting patients to the hospital. But it's been flagged as a budget problem because of rapidly increasing costs and big differences in how communities around the country use the benefit.
Part of the problem appears to be rampant fraud. In some counties home health admissions exceed the number of residents on Medicare.
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The charge would be collected for each home health agency admission, not for every visit by a nurse or provider. Patients can be under home health care for weeks at a time.
Seniors may have to pay for Medicare home health - Yahoo! News
First bolded: wouldn't coordinating the system across counties be another way to solve the problem?
Second bolded: "In some counties home health admissions exceed the number of residents on Medicare". Who is perpetrating the fraud? It doesn't sound like Medicare patients are, if the admissions exceed the number of residents on Medicare. So the conclusion would be that it is those who are either doing the admissions or someone(s) else within the system? Which brings me to this
Third bolded: "The charge would be collected for each home health agency admission". It would appear that fraud is coming from within the system and it is known that there are home health admissions exceeding the number of residents on Medicare, so to solve the problem they want to charge those who are not causing the fraud . . . those on Medicare?
Am I reading this wrong?
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