Regulatory / Legislative/ Legal impact on health care Delivery Paper - Essay Example

type of patients are those who were private payers prior to their admission to health care institutions, but who spent all their assets during their stay, and have to resort to Medicaid upon final discharge, with all their assets exhausted. “This process is known as “Medicaid spend-down.” Medicaid spend-down is a topic of considerable interest for the financing of long-term care because it is an indication of the catastrophic effect of long-term care expenses on individuals and increased cost to public programs.

” (Adams, Meiners & Burwell, 1992). In most cases, these would be cases in which the probability of the patients coming out of the health care setting is very remote, in other words they would be lifelong patients of the nursing care unit in which they were admitted. Thus, it would not be wrong to say that their entire savings would be spent on Medicaid, and in the event they were not entitled to Medicaid, heavy debts would also accumulate to their carers and families. The main issue that arises is the waste of funds that multiple hospital admission would result in, especially if the norms and requirements of Medicare are not met in terms of required eligibility criteria for benefiting from Medicaid.

Definitely, it has an enormous impact upon the institution where the patient is undergoing treatment. This could be in terms of additional resource mobilization that would be needed to be infused, in case the asset spend-down is over, and the patient does not have any assets left for further treatment. In such cases, the State would have to bear the costs of treatment, through the use of public insurance schemes. It is often seen that some States are selective about the quantum and nature of Medicaid to be reimbursed.

It is seen that “States are also known to vary in the relative restrictiveness with which they apply Medicaid eligibility procedures for long-term care coverage. For example, some States are more restrictive than others in the degree