Error keeps Nampa hospital out of Medicare, Medicaid business for weeks

An oversight at a new St. Luke’s hospital in Nampa is keeping it from being able to take non-emergency patients who have government health insurance — from its opening Oct. 30 through at least the early weeks of December — unless those patients agree to potentially pay their own hospital bills.

The hospital is licensed to treat all patients. But it has yet to get the approval it needs to bill federal health insurance plans including Medicare, Medicaid, Medicare Advantage and Tricare.

St. Luke’s officials mistakenly thought they didn’t need to have an accreditation survey done immediately after they opened their doors Oct. 30. They believed they could take until January to get ready for the survey, then, after passing and becoming accredited, back-bill for all the services they had done since they opened.

But they learned earlier this month that back-billing to before accreditation isn’t allowed. They called their accrediting agency to ask for a quicker survey, which they hope will be conducted in early December. (The surveys are unscheduled and unannounced.)

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