Continuing Effort To Reduce Hospital Readmissions Results In Medicare Reductions To 2,225 Hospitals

Armed With Bigger Fines, Medicare To Punish 2,225, hospitals For Excess Readmissions by Jordan Rau.  Kaiser Health News.  August 2, 2013.

(1)  The penalty program is an effort to pay hospitals for the ______________ rather than merely the number of patients they treat.

(2)  In ________ states at least four out of five hospitals were penalized.

(3)  A Harvard researcher summarized the most important aspect of this problem as "reaching outside ______________."

(4)  What is the "perverse financial incentive" that the penalties are designed to address?

(5)  Medicare estimates that _______% of Medicare patients may be readmitted for avoidable reasons.

(6)  The Medicare penalties appear to impact hospitals that ______________________

(7)  Medicare believes that "hospitals that care for large proportions of patients of low socioeconomic status are _____________________.

(8)  Hospitals that succeed in reducing readmissions may __________________ by forgoing those second patient admissions.

(9)  Explain the tradeoff between low mortality rates and aggressiveness in recalling patients who seem to not be healing.

(10)  True or False:  The hospital industry is enthusiastic in support of the penalties.

(11)  A key objective of the penalties is to force medical providers to do a better job _______________________.