Medicare is reducing payments to 751 hospitals because of the high rate at which their patients have suffered avoidable injuries and illnesses while in the hospital.
The penalties come under Medicare’s Hospital-Acquired Condition Reduction Program, which was established by the Affordable Care Act.
Among the penalized hospitals,
- more than half were penalized last year as well
- 115 are academic medical centers – about one-third of all such facilities
- more than one-third of all safety-net hospitals were penalized
Over the years NAUH has argued that the program is unfair to private safety-net hospitals because it fails to give any weight to the additional challenges such hospitals face because of the socio-economic risk factors of the communities and patients they serve.
Learn more about the program, the penalties, and why the penalties were assessed in this Kaiser Health News report.
