Are Medicare Advantage Plans Steering Enrollees to Lower-Quality Nursing Homes?

A new study has found that people enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan were more likely to enter a lower-quality nursing home than were people in traditional Medicare. The study raises questions about whether Medicare Advantage plans are influencing beneficiaries' decisionmaking when it comes to choosing a nursing home.

Medicare Advantage plans, an alternative to traditional Medicare, are provided by private insurers rather than the federal government. The government pays Medicare Advantage plans a fixed monthly fee to provide services to each Medicare beneficiary under their care, and the services must at least be equal to regular Medicare’s. While the plans sometimes offer benefits that original Medicare does not, the plans usually only cover care provided by doctors in their network or charge higher rates for out-of-network care.

The study, conducted by researchers at Brown University School of Public Health, examined Medicare beneficiaries entering nursing homes between 2012 and 2014. Using Medicare’s Nursing Home Compare website as the measure of quality, the study found that beneficiaries in Medicare Advantage plans tended to enter lower quality nursing homes than beneficiaries in original Medicare. This was true even when the researchers took into account the beneficiaries' distance from the nursing home and other decision factors. Even beneficiaries enrolled in highly rated Medicare Advantage plans were more likely to enter a low-quality nursing home compared to original Medicare beneficiaries.

The study does not draw any conclusions about whether the Medicare Advantage beneficiaries fared worse than original Medicare beneficiaries, only that they tended to enter facilities that had higher re-hospitalization rates and worse outcomes. The study concluded that Medicare Advantage plans may be influencing beneficiary decisionmaking around nursing home selection. According to Skilled Nursing News, one of the study’s authors speculated that a Medicare Advantage plan "might be incentivized to send patients to a given nursing home regardless of what the quality ratings are, because of a relationship with that nursing home or because they have a lot of patients in that nursing home and can better manage their care."

Information on exactly why this is happening is “of vital policy importance,” according to the study's authors. They recommend gathering more information about Medicare Advantage nursing home claims and re-hospitalization rates and requiring Medicare Advantage plans to be more transparent about the quality of nursing homes in their networks.

New Brokerage Account Safeguards Aim to Protect Seniors From Financial Scams

New rules have been put in place to protect seniors with brokerage accounts from financial scams that could drain the accounts before anyone notices.

As the population ages, elder financial abuse is a mounting problem. Vulnerable seniors can become victims of scammers who convince them to empty their investment accounts. According to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the organization that regulates firms and professionals selling securities in the United States, its Securities Helpline for Seniors has received more than 12,000 calls and recovered more than $5.3 million for seniors whose investment funds were illegally or inappropriately distributed since the helpline opened in April 2015.

Now, FINRA has issued two new rules designed to help investment brokers or advisors better protect seniors’ accounts from financial exploitation. The rules, which went into effect in February 2018, apply when opening a brokerage account or updating information for an existing account.

First, the broker or investment advisor must ask the investor for the name of a trusted contact person. This is someone the broker can contact if there are questions about the account. The trusted contact is intended to be a resource for the broker to address possible financial exploitation and to obtain the customer’s current contact information and health status or learn about any legal guardian, executor, trustee or holder of a power of attorney.

The second rule allows a broker to place a temporary hold on disbursements from an account if those disbursements seem suspicious. This rule applies to accounts belonging to investors age 65 and older or investors with mental or physical impairments that the broker reasonably believes make it difficult for the investor to protect his or her own financial interests. Before disbursing the funds, the brokerage firm will be able to investigate the disbursement by reaching out to the investor, the trusted contact, or law enforcement.

Prior to the new rules, issues of privacy prevented a broker from contacting family members when suspicious activity was detected, and under previous FINRA rules brokerage firms risked liability for halting suspicious transactions.

Seniors Often Must Fight for Medicare Home Health Benefits

Medicare is mandated to cover your home health benefits with no limit on the time you are covered. Unfortunately, few Medicare beneficiaries get the level of service they are entitled to and many find their services cut off prematurely. Getting these benefits can be critically important. Medicare home health care benefits can mean the difference between being able to stay at home with a difficult medical problem or ending up in the hospital or a nursing home.

As a Medicare recipient, you are entitled to full home health benefits if you meet the following requirements:

• You must be confined to your home, meaning that leaving it to receive services would be a "considerable and taxing effort."
• Your doctor must have ordered home health services for you.
• At least some element of the services must be skilled, skilled nursing care, physical therapy, or speech therapy.
• You must receive the services from a certified home health agency.

Requiring an element of skilled care also will entitle you to Medicare coverage of social services, home health aide services, and the necessary medical supplies and equipment. You won't have to pay anything for the home health benefits, but you will have to pay 20 percent of the supplies and equipment.

Under the law, you are entitled to 35 hours of service a week, but few Medicare beneficiaries who meet the home health care criteria actually get this level of service. If your services are terminated prematurely, you will need to appeal. If you have to appeal, the good news is that most people win their cases. In fact, 81 percent are successful on appeal to an administrative law judge.

If you can you should continue to pay privately for the care during the process. Remember, the issue you are appealing is not the termination of service, but the denial of Medicare payment for the service.

In order to mount a successful campaign to get your services back, you should:

• Ask your home health agency to explain the cutback and write the information down.
• Ask your physician to call the agency urging them not to cut back the services and, then have the physician send a letter detailing the level of care you need.
• Consult with a Medicare assistance agency or your attorney to determine the likelihood of a successful appeal.
• If you decide to appeal, do so immediately and make sure you make arrangements to pay privately pending the result of the appeal.