Yep.
This was a sign I had at a Tea Party rally in Boston a few months ago:
Posted on 09/30/2012 4:20:05 PM PDT by Red Steel
Physicians will be reluctant to readmit patients even though they need it. It will cause them to compromise what they know to do is the right thing, and it will result in more deaths.
Isn't that special?
Non-compliance or poor compliance is only part of it. In the hospital the patient has 24 hour care. The lucky ones will have a caring family/spouse or can afford to pay for similar care when they get home. The rest of them will make do with whatever their spouse or famiy can give them....which may well be little to nothing in some or many cases.
It was clear if "he" had been calling the shots, Granny wouldn't have had that surgery and a chance at walking without pain
Not that she ever got to walk again anyway, since we were told she died of :”cancer” the night of his election while convalescing from her hip replacement...? Another very strange story there, and never investigated by the press
A panel of bureocrats sitting in Washington DC will decide what happends to those in Dallas, TExas. Cost/Benefit ratio has taken over the doctor/patient relationship. God help the elderly, infirmed, and ill.
Did they get this idea from Romneycare??? I think not.
Wife’s family just went through hell with this. The doctors were pissed at the family for causing the fine, forced them to put their mother in hospice. Also denied her needed oxygen unless they accepted hospice. The doctor told the children they had to “go along with the program” if they wanted oxygen for their mother. We just had the funeral.
Obama and all leftists are evil.
They did it just killed my MIL this way. There was a reason people were so angry over Obamacare.
I’d like to get the reporter who wrote in this article that Obama is trying to “improve care” and “save taxpayers money” and spit in their lying liberal face.
The take away here is the doctors are not making treatment decisions the mindless federal law is.
Hospital Administrator: Ah, I see you have the machine that goes ‘ping!’. This is my favorite. You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to - that way it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account.
[The doctors and onlookers applaud.]
Hospital Administrator: Thank you, thank you. We try to do our best. Well, do carry on.
The really unfortunate thing is, that won't happen. Hospital reimbursement is being determined by adherence to different metrics, and one of those is readmission rates.
Some eggheads who probably never had squat to do with real medicine, or are openly hostile to the way it is practiced, set this up as a metric.
Hospitals will still try to get the patients discharged in the time frame to limit length of stay, and patients will likely still be readmitted the way they were before, but I think it would be naive to think that the readmission process would not be affected by increased bureaucracy (to try to prevent non-essential readmissions) resulting in indecision and possible delays.
The bottom line (and this is my personal opinion) is that it is going to reduce money paid to hospitals because it will set limits on something that hospitals may not have much control over.
And that is the plan. I am not a physician, and it is indeed possible to take actions that would minimize readmissions, but that well is a limited one. Once you pick the low-hanging fruit you will begin to see fast diminishing returns (you spend X amount of time and money to get to 85% of the solution, then you have to spend Y (a lot more than X) to get up above 90%) and it becomes increasingly difficult to improve, you will not meet the metric, and your reimbursements will be cut.
The government tries to make the claim that it is not an absolute number, but a comparative statistic to other similar types of hospitals and you have to stay in the top tenth to get full reimbursement, but...not everybody can make it in to that percentile.
SOMEONE has to fall outside it, and those that do will lose money. It will make providing healthcare even more expensive for them, and the only way they will survive is to be swallowed up by someone else. Otherwise they will go out of business.
By design, of course. If they go out of business, they can't treat patients, and the remaining available resources in a given locality of physicians, technologists, nurses, beds, appointment times for diagnostic tests such as MRI and CT become even more stretched as patients go to already overburdened facilities for appointments and tests.
Delays occur. Instead of three days to a week for an outpatient MRI, it will be three weeks or even three months until you can get in.
Again, by design. This is called "Rationing", but not in the sense we are usually accustomed to seeing it. It is the way liberals ration things from fuel to food by making the supply go down and price go up.
To me, it is certainly conceivable that patient care will be negatively affected by focusing on a metric that will simply discourage caregivers from giving that care.
“The doctor told the children they had to “go along with the program” if they wanted oxygen for their mother. We just had the funeral.”
Sue them, NOW.
Just get Obama out of office.
Yep.
This was a sign I had at a Tea Party rally in Boston a few months ago:
If it is any consolation to you, thers bastards are going to be killed themselves later on down the road by the same insturment[s] that they plan on using on us now. Sorry about your MIL.
I know conservatives don’t like going to lawsuits, but in this case you need to. Those doctors will do the same thing to some other family if they don’t learn a lesson. Make them pay for their crime.
I wish it were only that simple.
Liberals have been furiously opening bureaucratic offices, writing policies, hiring people and generally getting as much entrenched bureaucracy in place before someone figures out how Obamacare can be torn apart.
Even if we did elect someone far more conservative than Romney, liberals have been busy as bees laying concrete foundations and entrenching the pillars. Their plan is to make nearly impossible to rip out the metastatic bureaucracy.
For them to die is the purpose of the rules or plan. People are admitted or readmitted to the hospital because for one reason or another, they need to be. This is merely the first step of getting rid of the elderly and infirm.
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