HHS reports O-Care cut into hospital deaths

thehill.com ^ | may 7, 2014 | Ferdous Al-Faruque

[lowbridge]

The Obama administration on Wednesday claimed the new healthcare law helped cut the number of deaths in hospitals by 15,000 in 2012.

Data from the Department of Health and Human Services also found about $4 billion in savings compared to the previous year.

-snip

The report also found while 30-day Medicare hospital readmission held at a steady 19 percent between 2007 and 2011 that number dropped to 17.5 percent by 2013. According to HHS that meant 150,000 fewer hospital readmissions among Medicare beneficiaries between January 2012 and December 2013.

[b4its2late]

[kaila]

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.

[lurk]

Such a statistic can never be proven. People die, and whether their death could have been prevented is often merely subjective.

This is just more feel-good Stalin era propaganda.

[Salvation]

BTTT for the truth!

[bkopto]

Did ObamaNoCare shut down lots of hospitals, thus the statistic?

[Nifster]

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)

[kaila]

Maybe not in your daughters area, but I have read articles in which hospitals are pushing their patients ( who meet inpatient acuity and have been in the hospital 3 midnights) into SNF s because it reduces their risk of a return admission. However, that only applies to the patients who meet the inpatient criteria. Medicare has made a 48 hour observation rule on all patients admitted to the hospital( in which all insurance companies now follow- if Medicare makes a rule by law that rule applies to everyone) which makes it hard for patients to meet the criteria for an SNF because If you are an observation patient, you do not qualify for an SNF. If we had Republican politicians who had an ounce of intelligence, they should be screaming this fact about Obamacare to the elderly population, but they do not.

[Nifster]

Your comments about observation to SNF is exactly correct.

I believe part of why this area (northern Georgia) has more of the home based care incidents is because there are fewer SNFs here so home based care is what the docs order.

I think we agree that what is happening to patient care is atrocious and driven by the government meddling into health care based on O’s power grab.