Hospital Readmission Penalties
Stanley Feld M.D.,FACP,MACE
Obamacare has set up a system whereby if a patient is readmitted to a hospital 30 days after discharge the hospital will not be paid for the readmission and will incur a fine.
Hospitals are paid for admissions by diagnoses. The more diagnoses the more they get paid. The length of stay the government will pay for is also determined by the diagnosis.
The number of games played with the diagnosis of a patient is legendary. Hospitals are in the business of making money. The more money hospitals make the higher the administrator’s salary.
If patients have to be readmitted to the hospital within 30 days the patients are told to get readmitted to a different hospital to avoid government non-payment.
Bureaucrats who know nothing about patient care and the natural history of disease created this dumb readmission criteria.
The bureaucrats’ goal was to provide incentives by the threat of penalty for hospitals to improve quality of patient care.
I told my readers that the incentives were wrong. It would be to the disadvantage of patients. Hospitals would figure out how to get around the penalties.
Medicare does not pay for outpatient (observation) admissions. Hospitals can admit patients on observation (outpatients) for 48 hours.
I explained how hospitals could extend outpatient admissions (observations) 72 hours. Patients are responsible out of pocket for the admission bill.
Many of the readmissions are recurrent congestive heart failure. These patients can be treated and released from the hospital in less than 24 hours and at most 48 hours. Patients with congestive heart failure must become “Professors of the Treatment of Congestive Heart Failure.” Patients must be responsible for their care. They must be provided with financial incentives to become “Professors” of their disease.
Most of the time readmission is not the result of poor quality hospital care. It is the result of patients not understanding the cause of the recurrence of their congestive heart failure.
Most of the time patients do not pay attention to what they are taught to abort an episode of congestive heart failure and subsequent readmission to the hospital.
Most of the time hospital call in help desks does not improve patient compliance with treatment.
“Hospital readmissions that Medicare penalizes under the Affordable Care Act are largely driven by patient characteristics such as income and education rather than the quality of care they receive, according to a new study.”
“This finding suggests that Medicare is penalizing hospitals to a large extent based on the patients they serve,” the authors conclude.
Hospitals in poor areas and urban hospitals have been disproportionately penalized under the readmission program.
In fiscal 2016, about 1,600 hospitals will see their base operating DRG payments knocked down as much as 3%.
Medicare payments were decreased 1% in fiscal 2013 for readmission before 30 days. That number increased to 2% in fiscal 2014 and 3% in 2015.
Penalties and fines applied only for heart attack, heart failure or pneumonia until 2015. In 2015 readmission rates for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and total hip and total knee replacements have been added to the penalty list.
The addition of these diagnoses will result in additional fines to hospitals. Additional penalties will affect hospitals’ bottom line severely and not lead to increased quality care.
Only 769 of more than 3,370 hospitals have avoided fines. Some hospital might have to close because of the penalities.
I have said many times that policy wonks do not know how to measure quality.
Hospitals avoiding penalties and fines are not necessarily providing better quality care. These hospitals might treat less sick patients or more intelligent patients,
The Obamacare incentives are upside down. Punishment hardly ever works to improve quality healthcare.
Has anyone ever thought about providing incentives to patients to learn how to improve their own compliance to medical care?
In an entitlement society patients are taught to expect (entitled) to be cured without applying much effort on their own.
They are taught to be dependent on physicians and hospitals to cure them of their chronic disease.
Physicians should be the coaches. Patients are the players in the treatment of their diseases.
Obamacare’s readmission policy is all wrong. Its goal is to keep patients in a passive dependent role.
Only when government healthcare policy wonks understand that consumers of healthcare must be provided with incentives to be responsible for their healthcare and medical care decisions will America be on the way to Repairing the Healthcare System.
No one in Washington is thinking this way.
The opinions expressed in the blog “Repairing The Healthcare System” are, mine and mine alone