Thousands of low-income nursing home patients in Maryland will have millions in old debts wiped out now that the state has settled a years-long case involving Medicaid payments. Much of the $16 million settlement will go directly to nursing homes that had not received payments from those patients. "We're starting to send checks to nursing homes now," said Cyril V. Smith, a lawyer for Zuckerman Spaeder LLP who represented the 12,000 Maryland patients who owed the money to about 160 nursing homes. "This wipes out a lot of debt." The money was about a quarter of what the nursing homes said they were owed from 2002-2005, when Smith and others filed a class-action lawsuit in Baltimore Circuit Court. But perhaps more important than the one-time payment, he said, is the change in obscure state Medicaid rules that will aid future nursing home patients and could become a road map for other states. Those rules govern how — and when — a patient is required to make a co-payment for nursing home care.
