Kindred Healthcare Inc.'s long-term term care hospitals and skilled nursing facilities won a second chance to collect $9.7 million from Medicare to satisfy low-income patients’ unpaid deductibles and copays, a federal court in the District of Columbia said.
This is one of several cases in which health-care providers challenged the Health and Human Services Department’s enforcement of a “bad debt” policy that required them to bill state Medicaid agencies and receive remittance advice documents denying payment before billing Medicare for treating people who were eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid.
Federal courts have mostly sided with the providers, as the ...