Huge Moneymaker: Preventable Readmissions

As you can probably tell from my ATS name and avatar, my main interest is definitely not politics or medical issues and conspiracies. But, the local talk shows in Pittsburgh were buzzing over an article that appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review yesterday, March 6, 2011 regarding healthcare waste and excessive fees in PA. Here's a bit from the article:

Pennsylvania hospitals charged more than $1.25 billion in 2009 to treat patients who were readmitted for complications or infections that might have been avoided, a Tribune-Review investigation has found.

Read more: Probe: Hospital readmissions take toll in Pennsylvania - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review www.pittsburghlive.com...

Yes, that's Billion with a "B" in ONE year in ONE state in the nation. Some of the callers to the show had horror stories like the ones you'll read about in the article.

I did a search on ATS for a thread concerning this issue and found one from back on 2009 by ATS member "WhatTheory" who posted about "crazy regulations" in Obama's Healthcare Bill. In particular, the one item in the OP on Page 280 Section 1151,"The Government will Penalize Hospitals for What the Government Deems Preventable Readmissions." Here is the link to the thread:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

This investigation defines exactly what this portion of the bill is designed to stop - but will it be retroactive? Will they go back and penalize those hospitals? If not, what good will it do for the people and insurance companies that basically got robbed? On a much smaller scale, I have had charges appear on dentist bills and medical bills for services I did not receive, such as novacaine for a tooth procedure. I certainly did not receive it for a tooth cleaning! I'm a baby, but not that big of a baby.


Anyways - I just wanted to throw this out to the ATS family for your thoughts. I'm sure no one has started a thread for this particular article. It is more intended to back up dicussions and threads about Obamacare.

Youre assuming you can deal with all manner of medical matters with perfection at every decision point, measured against hoped for ever lasting life and comfort. There is no such thing available. Patients often lie, forget, misrepresent or are otherwise intoxicated or have other agendas,science is imperfect, dissimilar diseases share similar symptoms, the circumstances and symptoms evolve and contrary to popular belief, people are not all the same and they dont all respond the same and are not in the same condition.
You cant compare against perfection to assume liability, any more than you can assume that since only half of all lawyers win their cases , on average, that they are liable to malpractice simply because they lost. And lawyers pick and chose, and spend days and weeks on a single case( and there's nnever any insurance for it.).
News flash fa ya, with or without doctors, or hospitals, anywhere, all doctors eventually lose every patient to the reaper. All doctors die, too.
It's not the physicians task to save you from your lifes accrued mileage. THey are an adjunct for you to listen to or ignore as you wish. They are human and imperfect.
Nobody else is held to such an impossible standard, to take all comers under all conditions and keep them alive and comfortable forever, often, against their will, without cooperation and contrary to their lifestyle.