Lawsuit filed to End Practice of Hospital “Observation Status”.
Lawsuit filed to End Practice of Hospital “Observation Status”. On November 3, 2011, the Center for Medicare Advocacy and the National Senior Citizens Law Center filed a class action lawsuit against Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, on behalf of seven individual plaintiffs – all Medicare beneficiaries who received hospital inpatient services – harmed by the increasingly common practice of classifying these patients as on “observation status,” rather than inpatients.