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A lot of the patients who get readmitted within 30 days to the hospital have social issues that impact their disease, and that is why they are frequent flyer's. If they are sick enough not to be on observation status,and warrant a hospital admit- they get transferred more readily to a nursing home which lessens the impact of readmits. It would be interesting to see if the number of nursing home admissions has increased. This new rule on readmits may have a side effect of increasing nursing home usage, and the hospitals pushing that option on the patients more aggressively. Overall, it will not decrease healthcare costs.

Here where my daughter practices, nursing homes are NOT being used. Patients are sent home TOO SOON because medicare doesn’t cover long stays. Home based care does the best they can with all types of patients but some of these patients should not have been sent home....maybe not even to a SNF (which is really I think what you mean by nursing home) because there just aren’t as many of those as one would think.

We agree on the following “Overall, it will not decrease health care costs”. The ACA wasn’t designed to produce good health care at reasonable costs. It was designed to give O all the power he could possibly grab. IF he actually leaves office, it will be incumbent on the next president to deescalate (that is assuming that conservatives manage to win the WH)