Rehabilitation services are at risk

Former Congressman Henry J. Hyde, a patient at Marianjoy Rehabilitation Hospital in Wheaton, watched his son accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom on his behalf from the hospital board room, surrounded by family, friends and local political dignitaries.

Mr. Hyde is receiving specialized medical rehabilitation at Marianjoy following open heart surgery. Care such as the kind Mr. Hyde is now receiving is threatened by the "75% Rule," a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rule, which places unreasonable limitations on inpatient rehabilitation facilities.

This is a serious threat to rehabilitation hospitals that are now forced to comply with arbitrary criteria specified by the rule to determine an individual patient's admission eligibility rather than medical necessity and functional deficits. Marianjoy and other rehabilitation hospitals across the country have been unable to admit some patients whose diagnoses fall outside of the rule's parameters, leaving many people unable to access the rehabilitation services they can only receive in an inpatient acute rehabilitation facility.

When the enforcement of the CMS ruling went into effect in July 2004, CMS estimated that it would only affect 1,751 patients and reduce benefits by $10 million. However, in the first year alone, 44,000 people lost access to $212 million in inpatient medical rehabilitation appropriations. Since then, well over 100,000 Medicare beneficiaries alone have been impacted, losing access to $1.2 billion of inpatient rehabilitation patient care and services. As a result, well over 4,000 of the rehab beds in the United States have already been eliminated, and more will certainly be gone in the near future.

Unfortunately, patients like Mr. Hyde may be denied access to the medical rehabilitation they need in the very near future unless this arbitrary and overly restrictive ruling is overturned by Congress.

Kathleen C. Yosko President and CEO

Marianjoy Rehabilitation Hospital

Wheaton