Money Paid to Long Term Care patients who sold their homes
By jana on Feb 14, 2008 in Long Term Care
Out of UK yesterday comes a story that is sad and scary at the same time. Reported by By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor of The Independent, “More than £180m in compensation has been paid to patients wrongly charged for long-term nursing care in a bureaucratic blunder by the NHS.”
The story goes like this: hospitals needed to clear their beds so a policy began that the elderly got moved into nursing homes where the patient (or their family) had to pay for care. Their care should have been free according to England’s National Health Service (NHS) because they were health (illness or injury) related, not care (needing help dressing, eating or washing) related. Patients and their families were forced to sell their homes in order to cover bills that they should never have gotten. So 2,000 people have been compensated £90,000 and it looks as though another 1300 cases are being investigated.
The article talks about figures for 2007 showing “wide variations” from county to county in the number of people whose long-term care was funded and how standardization was needed and being called for. Although, I know that our system in the US is quite different, it got me thinking about our issues and if we are headed for a similar lawsuit caused by the disparity in Medicaid from state to state, individuals not knowing what they qualify for, and family members being incorrectly billed for long term care.
Interesting to think about…
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