She’s in a nursing home that has a rehab section of the nursing home and not a hospital. Medicare here pays for 21 days of care and then you’re either expected to go home or be bad enough to move into the actual nursing home wing and then if you have money, you pay for your own care and if you don’t, you go on Medicaid.
There can be quite a bit of financial incentive for a nursing home wanting to keep somebody past the 21 days. My friends that have went into the rehab section of nursing homes to recover from a illness or injury have experienced that even if they are better before the 21 days are up, the nursing home does not want to release them.
I will never go to one of those places to recover. I have seen too many bad things happen to people.
It depends on the nursing home. I've worked on skilled care units where a lot of patients were short term and after therapy and regaining strength, got to go home. I've always said that nursing homes are necessary evils. The quality of care is different from facility to facility.
Also...nursing homes aren't that crazy about keeping patients after their Medicare days are up unless the patient has insurance, private pay money, or property that can be liquidated to pay the bills. If they have none of these, they will have to go through the process of getting Medicaid and nursing homes lose money on Medicaid patients. Also there's usually a long list of patients on Medicaid waiting to get rooms.
It's not up to the nursing home to release the patient, the doctor has to give orders to release the patient. The doctor has to be sure it's safe medically for the patient to go home by themselves, because he (or she) is looking at the liability aspect.
Without doctors orders, the patient can leave AMA but the patients insurance can deny paying for the stay if they choose to do so. Also, unless a family member or friend would take the patient home, I'm not sure an ambulance service or taxi service would. I guess if they were guaranteed payment they might.
It can be complicated and takes a lot of thought before making any major decisions like busting out of a nursing home. Beings non of us really know what's going on behind the scenes, it's hard to say what the best option would be.