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Mail
Magazine 24
Obamacare
Starts Crippling
Hospitals
by Gailon Totheroh
Perhaps
Obamacare should be titled
PenaltyCare.
With
Medicare now rolling over into
Obamacare, many hospitals are taking a hit and losing payments.
Particularly
hard hit, strangely enough, was well-to-do Connecticut–as reported by
Hearst
Media Group.
Eighty-six
percent of the state’s
acute-care hospitals were penalized, that is, are losing lots of money
under a
new Medicare program put in place by Obamacare requirements.
One
reason for the penalties was
readmission. If a person goes back into the hospital within 30 days
after an
initial stay then that counts against the institution’s record. The new
government requirement doesn’t even take into account the reason for
the
readmission—it’s considered automatically bad.
Here
we have another aspect of
Obamacare defying reality and common sense. Not surprisingly, hospitals
are
feeling beleaguered–according to one hospital official:
“In
the big picture, we don’t
really zoom in on these particular indicators (measured by Medicare),
so much
as we look for ways to improve the patient experience,” he said. “We
made a lot
of `system fixes’ before the (payment) changes went into effect because
they
were the right thing to do to improve quality and safety and our
patients’
experiences.”
Whether
government edicts from
Obamacare will ultimately make any difference whatsoever in hospital
care is at
best questionable. All we do know is that the penalties will go up:
On
readmissions, Medicare began
reducing payments to more than 2,200 hospitals nationwide, including
the 23 in
Connecticut, in October. The maximum penalty is set to double to 2
percent next
October and then reach 3 percent of reimbursements in October 2015.
This
is not to say that hospitals
don’t need improvement. The question is how much will Obamacare force
all
hospitals to make changes that don’t really improve health–and how much
more
bureaucracy and cost will result.
Source:
LibertyNews
Read
this and other articles at Mail Magazine
24
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