I did not realize there were any. That is in Texas? So they simply refuse admission?
I checked in WA, OR, and ID and there were 91, 60 and 38 hospitals that DO accept Medicare. 381 that do in Texas -- that really is a big state.
It is a new Texas Health Hospital at Alliance. I looked on their web site back in December to find out what insurances they accepted and none of them were for Medicare. Finally after several unproductive phone conversations with the hospital billing office I was directed to someone that said they had their application for Medicare in but the government hadn’t accepted it. The hospital opened in Sept ‘12 and as of March ‘13 they were only accepting Medicare for ER services. They finally got Medicare approval around May.
An increasing number of doctors and hospitals are declining Medicare because, with the advent of ZeroCare, the rates Medicare pays are declining in an effort to force more people to sign up for ZeroCare.
This, in turn, is causing more doctors to either retire from private practice or simply decline to accept new Medicare patients.