Joseph Rugg's Health Law Blog

Several New York-area hospitals will lose millions of dollars in federal Medicare payments, because too many of their patients keep coming back — and the government’s tired of paying for it.

The list of penalized hospitals includes some of the region’s biggest players: city hospitals, like Bellevue, Jacobi, Coney Island and Elmhurst; academic medical centers such as Beth Israel, St. Luke’s-Roosevelt and Mt. Sinai; and suburban ones like North Shore and Hackensack medical centers.

The federal government says if hospitals took better care of patients — especially ones with high needs — they wouldn’t be “frequent flyers,” constantly being readmitted and costing taxpayers billions of dollars.

Starting in October, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will start withholding up to 1 percent of Medicare payments from hospitals with too many “frequent flyer” patients. The maximum penalty will climb to 3 percent by October 2014.

Medicare came up with its list of “frequent flier” hospitals by looking at the 30-day readmission rate for patients with heart failure, heart attack and pneumonia.

See on www.wnyc.org

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