Under the new health law, Medicare will reduce payments to hospitals if too many patients are readmitted after treatment for heart attacks, heart failure or pneumonia. In addition, Medicare will cut payments to hospitals if they do not replace paper files with electronic health records, and it will further reduce payments to hospitals with high rates of preventable errors, injuries and infections.This sounds like a great idea, so long as we can keep it going the route No Child Left Behind tended to force poor schools to take:
Administration officials said they were aware of concerns that some hospitals might try to increase their performance scores by avoiding high-risk patients. The officials said they would watch closely for signs of such a problem.I'm not 100% positive that I'm on board with this plan, but it's certainly a step in the right direction.
Also, via Drum, more doctors prefer a national single-payer system:
Remember this was support for federal legislation to establish National Health Insurance. That’s far more radical than the PPACA. And 59 percent of physicians supported it. That was an increase of 10 percent from what we found five years earlier, and it was statistically significant. More than half the respondents from every medical specialty supported it, with the exception of surgical subspecialties, anesthesiologists and radiologists. That means support included a majority of general surgeons, medical subspecialists and obstetricians/gynecologists.
Most significantly, in pretty much every specialty we measured in both years, support went up from 2002 to 2007.If doctors aren't the leaders of the resistance to national health insurance, who is left? Hospital administrators?
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