172 Medicare no longer paying for hospital mistakes

This is a bit off topic from Alzheimer's, but not from my dad.
Medicare won't pay hospitals for errors
Almost every condition they are no longer paying for my dad had, and the combination of those conditions are what killed him.
It's a new way to push for patient safety: Don't pay hospitals when they commit certain errors.....
Even when a hospital makes a preventable error, it still can be reimbursed for the extra treatment that patient will now require. Some errors can add $10,000 to $100,000 to the cost of a patient's stay.
Or kill them. Like my dad. :(
(O)ne in four hospitalized patients is outfitted with a urinary catheter. The tubes trigger more than half a million urinary tract infections a year, the most common hospital-caused infection.
Check. My dad had a UTI caused by being catheterized for months, starting when he was tied up in that awful emergency room without food, water or medicine for all those days.
Yet many patients don't even need catheters...and many who do have them for days longer than necessary....(N)early half of hospitals don't even keep track of who gets one.
Beginning Oct. 1, Medicare no longer will pay those extra-care costs for eight preventable hospital errors, including catheter-caused urinary tract infections, injuries from falls, and leaving objects in the body after surgery. Nor can hospitals bill the injured patient for those extra costs.
My dad had everything on that list except foreign objects left in his body after surgery.
Next year, Medicare will add three more errors to the no-pay list; ventilator-caused pneumonia and drug-resistant staph infections are top candidates.
We all know that my dad died of a drug-resistant staph infection from a cathether-induced UTI, after a hospital-caused fall.
On the one hand, this idea seems great to me. Punish the hospitals for giving shitty care! But in the long run, who is going to pay for these errors? They will just raise the prices of everything. No hospital is going to "eat" all that money.
Hospitals screw up, badly, all the time. A friend of mine who is a nurse was telling me a couple of weeks ago that while she was on vacation, someone from her emergency room called to say "we just killed a guy, what do we tell the family?" They forgot a critical step in the guy's care, and by the time they figured it out and went to rectify it, he was dead. Horrifying. If I make a mistake at work, a coupon might get printed with a wrong expiration date, or someone's name is misspelled, or there's a typo in a headline. If she makes a mistake, a person can be hurt or even killed. Not a job I want to have.
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106 raking leaves the Alzheimer's way

Thank you all for your comments & suggestions on the Medicare thing. We did write to Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (email) and she sent a (snail mail) letter the same day with all the forms we needed to authorize her to step in and help. Meanwhile my mom kept calling Medicare during the more "acceptable" times and finally got through to a person who CLAIMS it is fixed but everything has to be re-submitted by the doctor and the hospital. So I am not convinced we are out of the woods yet.
Then my grandmother got a letter from Medicare saying they were cutting her benefits because an audit showed she had more than $10,000 in "stocks and investments" which she doesn't. She wanted me to take care of it. I know nothing about Medicare and insurance. Why me? My mom ended up going over there and making the calls. Of course because she's not my grandmother, that causes its own set of problems. She's got POA for my dad, but not my grandma, who's mostly competent. It didn't exactly get resolved, but my mom said they kept questioning my grandmother's address so she's thinking they mixed her up with someone else.
I asked my mom if I could borrow the leaf-blower to do my yard. Instead they decided to come over on Saturday and help. Which is fine, great, all that. I was feeding the birds so I didn't come out right away. As soon as I did, my dad looked up at me and said "Hi!" in absolute astonishment, as if to say "what's SHE doing here?"
I took the leaf blower and did my garden and my Meditation Circle. My dad raked the section of my yard closest to the house and my mom raked up by the garage.
My father picks up every twig, stick and fallen branch.
Every one.
He breaks it very carefully into pieces about a foot long.
And places them on the nearest table.
I have one wooden picnic table and two round resin tables. All three were piled high with carefully broken twigs, all aligned parallel with each other.
Then he starts carrying the leaves up into the back, where we have a big compost-kind of pile. He gets confused and then brings the leaves back to the leaf pile in the middle of the yard and puts them there. In fact, I think he may have been bringing leaves FROM the compost pile TO the yard for a while.
My mom started to carry the leaves from his section and he was standing there confused and she accidentally conked him in the head with the rake handle as she went by. She felt bad, but this is how he is. He hasn't the sense to duck or get out of the way. (When I am leaving their house or my grandmother's, he will stand right behind the car or right in front of it, waving and waiting. Sometimes he walks away and then wanders back. I'm afraid I'm going to hit him some day.)
My mom gets impatient with him, and I know she shouldn't, but I can see why. Sometimes he just doesn't GET it. She's saying 'hurry up and finish, I want to go home' and he's just standing there watching us work. Then he goes to pick up some leaves, and there's a branch, and he has to go through his breaking up the branch routine. He hands ME the pieces. I say "I don't want twigs. I don't save twigs." And I throw them back into the leaf pile, which gets him all upset.
After he left I found twigs piled everywhere. It was like being in Karl Wagner's short story "Sticks."

105 Medicare nightmare

My mom got a bill for $22,000 from Medicare saying they were NOT covering my dad's angioplasty/stent/stint (however the hell you spell it--I can't even get 2 people to agree on how to SAY it) . Their reasoning? My mom has a job and therefore has other insurance. Which she hasn't for 2 years.
Like a dutiful daughter I went over yesterday and called Medicare.
Can I give you some advice?
DON'T ever call Medicare.
A polite recorded voice told me there was high call volume and all representatives were busy and I might have to hold for a while. Fine. The voice then suggested I call back at another time, and gave me some options. I held on. The voice said again that all representatives were busy, suggested I check the Medicare web site for help, and then hung up on me.
This happened three times. I was on hold various times, from a minute or two to close to twenty.
Total bullshit.
So I went downstairs, went to the Medicare web site, and they have NOTHING. No contact form. Everything directs you to call the SAME number that just told me to check the website instead and hung up on me.
I hate government. I've voting today. Any incumbent, I've voting out. No one could be worse than who we have now.
As far as my dad goes, he's been really quiet. He asks me all the time "when are you coming again?" and I tell him the date and time, he looks at his watch and says "what's today?" So I'll explain. "Today's Friday. I'll see you at 5:00 on Sunday at Grandma's for dinner." "Okay." He shakes my hand, pats me on the shoulder.
One day recently, when I was explaining when I would come over again, he said, looking sad, "You're really busy, huh." It makes me feel so guilty, like I should move back into their basement. Yeah, like that would work. But then on Friday when he said "When you coming again? About a week?" and I said Sunday, he was happy.
But when I went over yesterday to call Medicare, he didn't even come and talk to me until I was leaving, and then he only waved.
A couple of weeks ago, I went over on a Wednesday night for dinner and then stayed to do a puzzle. My mom decided to take the dog for a walk. My father got very upset. "I don't like it when she's not here," he said to me, prowling the house. "I don't like it at all." I explained that he wasn't alone, I was there with him, but that didn't matter.
However, my mom was surprised when this weekend, he was talking to someone on the trail where they were walking with the dog, and he said "my wife" (he doesn't know her name, though--she's "hey" and "they"). My mom said he was trying to talk about me, but he couldn't remember my name or say "daughter". So I guess he does know who we are, to a certain degree. But he doesn't respond when I call him "dad" anymore so I call him "Bob."