Stroke survivors on Medicare have been put through enough! Year after year, they are hit with the possibility of facing a punitive cap on their rehabilitative therapy. Thankfully Congress routinely allows for an exceptions process, but it must be renewed every year. That usually happens at the last minute, right before the old exceptions process expires, leaving survivors in limbo. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just remove these caps altogether?
Tell your member of Congress to remove these arbitrary caps once-and-for-all.
Right now, the current exceptions process expires in March of 2015. If Congress does not act before then, stroke survivors will face limits of $1,900 a year on outpatient therapy. On average, that amounts to a single evaluation and just 19 outpatient therapy sessions. However, stroke survivors often need 3-5 therapy sessions a week, which means they’d reach the caps in less than two months. Stroke survivors deserve better.
Even though the March deadline is many months away, the opportunity to permanently remove these caps is now. Currently, a bill that eliminates the therapy caps once-and-for all has 221 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives, a bipartisan majority, and 33 cosponsors in the Senate, one-third of the Senate. However, if this bill is not passed and sent to the President before the new Congress is sworn-in in January, we will have to start over next year.
For far too long, Congress has kicked the can down the road. But stroke survivors need to know that they will have the care they need in their recovery. The time to act is now, but time is running out. Contact your member of Congress today!
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