Inpatient Hospital Coverage

Hospital services include both inpatient and outpatient care. Medicare Part A generally pays for hospital care when you are expected to need to be hospitalized through two or more midnights for medically necessary services that can only be performed in a hospital.

Inpatient hospital care refers to care you receive starting on the day you are formally admitted to the hospital. It ends the day before you are discharged.

However, you may also be in the hospital for outpatient care. This can happen if you are kept in a hospital for emergency or observation services, outpatient surgery, lab tests or X-rays, or other hospital services but your doctor has not written an order to admit you to the hospital.

Medicare Part A may not cover your hospital stay if you’re not considered an inpatient, but Medicare Part B may pay for some or all of your outpatient hospital services.

Medicare covers certain hospital care and medical services if you are a hospital inpatient. This coverage applies to acute care, critical access and long-term care hospitals, inpatient rehab, psychiatric and skilled nursing facilities and inpatient care if you are part of a qualifying clinical research study.

Inpatient care usually falls under Medicare Part A, but you may be responsible for some of the costs out of your own pocket.

Medicare inpatient coverage of psychiatric hospitalization is limited to 190 days over the course of your lifetime. There are also certain hospital services that are not covered.

Lifetime reserve days are extra days that can be added to hospital stays beyond 90 days. But you only get 60 of these extra days over the course of your life. When you use these lifetime reserve days, you still have to pay coinsurance — $838 per day in 2025.

You don’t have to apply all your lifetime reserve days to the same hospital stay. You can split them up as needed. But your hospital will start automatically using your lifetime reserve days when you run through 90 days of hospitalization in any benefit period.

If you don’t use your lifetime reserve days after a 90-day hospital stay, you will have to pay the full cost of each day you stay in the hospital going forward.

At least 12 Medicare supplemental insurance policies will cover your hospital coinsurance and provide another 365 lifetime reserve days. Medigap will also cover your hospital deductible.

This coverage is something to take into account if you are considering Medigap coverage. Remember that you cannot have both Medigap and Medicare Advantage coverage at the same time.