STATE OF NEW YORK, on Behalf of Margaret BODNAR, Appellee, v. SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, Appellant

OAKES, Chief Judge:

Margaret Bodnar was seventy-seven years old when she was brought by ambulance and carried in by stretcher to the Helen Hayes Hospital in West Haverstraw, New York, on August 6, 1982. Having left the hospital only two weeks earlier, after recuperation from surgery and from an infection to her left hip, Bodnar was suffering from a painful and swollen left knee. She could no longer walk except in pain.

The Secretary of Health and Human Services decided that Bodnar had not been in need of hospitalization on August 6, 1982, and, on this basis, denied the hospital’s later claim…