The Legend of the Avoidable Hospital Readmission

By HANS DUVEFELT, MD A long, long time ago, hospitals existed to admit patients when they were sick, treat them with medicines or surgery and good nursing care, and discharge them after they became well. Hospital care was at one time a charity, which evolved into a nonprofit service, before it became a Very Big Business. In olden days, nonprofit hospitals charged patients straightforward fees for their services. Then, when you were just a young whippersnapper or perhaps merely a gleam in your father’s eyes, Medicare and Big Insurance started collecting premiums from workers and dole it out to hospitals when the workers or retirees needed hospital care. At that point, hospital fees became confusing. The people who received care didn’t see what the charges were, and the payers didn’t really know how much care was medically necessary or even actually delivered by the increasingly profit-driven hospitals, let alone how much it cost to provide those services. Insurers demanded deep discounts, and hospitals raised charges. Billing became more and more convoluted and required more hospital documentation and more business staff at both the hospitals and the insurers. When an aspirin became as expensive as a four course meal and an overnight hospital stay became more expensive than the monthly lease payment for a Bentley, Medicare thought they had figured out a way to outsmart the hospitals: They started paying a flat rate for each hospital stay, based on the diagnosis. Suddenl...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: THCB Source Type: blogs