Ed note: These days you have to be pretty darn sick in order to be admitted to a hospital. Then they are anxious to make your stay as short as possible because they are now paid based on your diagnosis. So the worry was that hospitals would discharge you to soon resulting in too many readmissions. So penalties were put in place if a hospital had too many readmissions. The concern now is that they are too reluctant to let you back in when your condition worsens.
From the NYT: “It was a well-intended policy. Almost all parties agree on that much.
A decade ago, when Medicare beneficiaries were discharged from hospitals, one in five returned within a month.
Older people faced the risks of hospitalization all over again: infections, deconditioning, delirium, subsequent nursing home stays. And preventable readmissions were costing Medicare a bundle.
So the Affordable Care Act incorporated something called the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, which focused on three serious ailments with high readmission rates: heart failure, heart attacks and pneumonia.
The A.C.A. penalized hospitals — withholding up to three percent of Medicare payments — when readmissions within 30 days exceeded national averages.