1. Short title This Act may be cited as the Improving Access to Medicare Coverage Act of 2017 . 2. Findings Congress finds the following: (1) Medicare requires beneficiaries to be hospitalized for medically necessary inpatient hospital care for at least three consecutive days before covering post-hospital care in a skilled nursing facility. (2) Often patients remain under observation status in the hospital for several days. These days are not counted toward the 3-day inpatient stay requirement because they are considered outpatient days. (3) Hospitals’ use of observation stays has increased sharply since 2006. According to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission's March 2014 report, outpatient visits, many of which are observation stays, increased 28.5 percent between 2006 and 2012, with a simultaneous 12.6-percent decrease in inpatient stays over this same 6-year time period. A study published in Health Affairs found a 34-percent increase in the ratio of observation stays to inpatient admissions between 2007 and 2009, leading the researchers to conclude that outpatient observation status was becoming a substitute for inpatient admission. The same study also documented increases in long-stay outpatient status, including an 88-percent increase in observation stays exceeding 72 hours. (4) To health care providers, care provided during observation is indistinguishable from the care provided to inpatients, with all medically necessary care being provided, regardless of patient status. Beneficiaries are generally not informed of their inpatient or outpatient status and assume that they are inpatients when they are placed in a hospital bed, only to find out that such care was not counted for purposes of satisfying eligibility requirements for medically prescribed Medicare coverage of post-hospital care in a skilled nursing facility. (5) Older Americans and people with disabilities who are hospitalized but do not meet the 3-day inpatient hospital threshold simply because they were placed in outpatient observation