Oct 5 2014
The readmissions rate is dropping, but average fines will be higher this year.
Kaiser Health News: Medicare Fines 2,610 Hospitals In Third Round Of Readmission Penalties
Medicare is fining a record number of hospitals – 2,610 – for having too many patients return within a month for additional treatments, federal records released Wednesday show. Even though the nation's readmission rate is dropping, Medicare's average fines will be higher, with 39 hospitals receiving the largest penalty allowed, including the nation's oldest hospital, Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia (Rau, 10/2).
Also, there is a related story, A Guide To Medicare's Readmissions Penalties And Data (Rau, 10/2) and the chart detailing the readmissions penalties by state. You can also download the hospital data.
Also in news affecting seniors, federal officials sought to shut down a new Medicare scam.
CBS News: Medicare Scam Took Millions From The Elderly
The Federal Trade Commission said Thursday that it has shut down a scam in which millions of dollars were allegedly stolen from older people by callers who claimed to be working on behalf of Medicare. At the agency's request, a federal judge in Florida issued a temporary restraining order freezing the operation's assets so that money can be returned to victims of the scheme. It was not immediately clear how many people were defrauded (Lipka, 10/2).
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 This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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Even patients are shocked by the prices their insurers will pay — and it costs all of us