Could you not have transferred him to another hospital and paid for the additional care there?
A lot of people don't understand this about Medicare and are caught like we were when this happened. I often bring it up in conversations about health care because I don't want others to be caught unsuspecting like we were. We had 12 hours to get a hospital bed and a nursing service (which WE had to pay for). My sisters and I took turns staying with my parents at night because it saved money on nurses. ALl of us were working at the time so we had to have the day nurses (who were not that good) and my mother was in a wheelchair so she could do nothing.
And if all of us had lived out of town and my mother had been in a nursing home they would have STILL released him. They would have sent him to a private nursing home which Medicare does not pay for and would have exhausted all of his money and then put him on Medicaid, and then he would have been transferred to a low-rent nursing facility.
Younger people always think that Medicare is just like private insurance, but it is not.
snugs, there is a very thorough discussion of the proposed changes in a lib magazine, The Atlantic. The author wrote that the true customer of today’s hospitals is not the patient but Medicare and Medicaid, which are paying almost 50% of all the bills. I had not seen that observation before, but it explains very well the relationship between hospital administration, patient, and third-party payer.
The author did a serious study of today’s hospital systems after his father died from a hospital-acquired infection and spent 5 weeks in an ICU.
So already government bureaucracies control most of what hospitals are allowed to do.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care