Bill Baar’s West Side blog led me to the story of how the Obama Administration is penalizing hospitals it judges to have too high readmission rates, for Medicare patients.
Centegra’s Woodstock Hospital
Fox News explains, “Starting in October, Medicare will reduce reimbursements to hospitals with high 30-day readmission rates — which refers to patients who return within a month — by as much as 1 percent. The maximum penalty increases to 2 percent the following year and 3 percent in 2014.”
The Fox News article quotes a doctor as saying, “The readmission measures are risk-adjusted measures.”
Hospitals McHenry County patients use most are listed below
- Centegra Health System – Woodstock Hospital, Woodstock 1.00%
- Centegra Health System – McHenry Hospital, McHenry 1.00%
- Swedish American Hospital, Rockford 0.64%
- Sherman Hospital, Elgin 0.61%
- Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital, Barrington 0.48%
- Provena – Saint Joseph Hospital, Elgin, 0.27%
- Rockford Memorial Hospital, Rockford 0.26%
- Saint Anthony Medical Center, Rockford 0.04%
Maybe if people weren’t booted out of the hospital before they are well they wouldn’t be readmitted so often.
Hmm.
Just one more reason to get him out.
The list is growing rapidly.
This time people vote with your brain not your eyes.
GO ROMNEY.
Curious what you all think the problem is with this.
This is good public policy.
Good health care policy should incentivize good health outcomes.
High readmission rates mean that the hospitals are not achieving good health outcomes.
Yeah I’m puzzled too- if you get readmitted in less than a month that sure seems to me something is wrong.
So going after hospitals that have a high rate of re-admissions would be a good thing?
I mean, if someone OTHER than Obama was doing it, right?
Romney care has an identical policy by the way, Zorro.
@Zorro…you don’t understand the big picture.
This is good and much overdue needed policy.
Defrauding the government is what these medical facilities do very well.
The biggest reason for re-admissions in the local hospitals is addiction to medications.
A family member of mine has worked at NIMC for over five years now and they tell me that they have been dealing with recidivism because of drug adictions.
The hospital has been trying to lower these cases for years now but it is not an easy task.
**The biggest reason for re-admissions in the local hospitals is addiction to medications.**
Got any data to support this? Because I have never seen such a statistic supporting your claim.
Further, the readmission data is risk-adjusted, so your impliation (that hospitals are being punished for patients with drug addictions) doesn’t seem very legitimate or relevant to this discussion.
I find it very telling that there is not one substantive policy opposition to this policy. People only hate it because it is “Obamacare” rather than some GOP policy.