A U.S. government program meant to improve medical care and cut costs by penalizing hospitals that repeatedly readmit people with heart failure may have instead increased the risk that the patients would die, a new study suggests.
The policy, called the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, was created in 2010 under Obamacare as one of several ways to use Medicare's immense buying power to improve care. Under the program, hospitals were reimbursed less when heart failure patients were readmitted within a month.
It did reduce the number of costly readmissions, according to the study, which was published Sunday by JAMA Cardiology. Yet the number of patients who died rose as well. The findings could indicate an additional 5,000 to 10,000 deaths annually across the U.S., said Gregg Fonarow, the senior author of the paper and professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Complete your profile to continue reading and get FREE access to BenefitsPRO, part of your ALM digital membership.
Your access to unlimited BenefitsPRO content isn’t changing.
Once you are an ALM digital member, you’ll receive:
- Breaking benefits news and analysis, on-site and via our newsletters and custom alerts
- Educational webcasts, white papers, and ebooks from industry thought leaders
- Critical converage of the property casualty insurance and financial advisory markets on our other ALM sites, PropertyCasualty360 and ThinkAdvisor
Already have an account? Sign In Now
© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
