One of the numerous goals of the Affordable Care Act was to reduce costly and stressful hospital readmissions—in other words, to get more hospitals to solve patients’ problems the first time around.
A new article in the New England Journal of Medicine says the ACA’s Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program is working.
The researchers establish that this decrease in readmissions isn’t just a bookkeeping trick; hospitals didn’t just reclassify readmissions as “observations”. The ACA said, “Reduce readmissions,” and hospitals reduced readmissions.
That’s just one more success John Thune and Kristi Noem would like to reverse for the sake of their anti-government, anti-social ideology.
This is all tied into reimbursement. If they don’t work on it, their money will go to another hospital.
The old carrot and a stick theory works.