Middle class tax increases enforced by the IRS, Death Panels, no freedom of choice for your own healthcare, and skyrocketing costs.
Welcome to ObamaCare.
Via One News Now.
If you or an elderly relative have been hospitalized recently and noticed extra attention when the time came to be discharged, there’s more to it than good customer service.
Starting Monday, Medicare will fine hospitals that have too many patients readmitted within 30 days of discharge due to complications. The penalties are part of a broader push under Barack Obama’s health care law to improve quality while also trying to cut costs.
About two-thirds of the hospitals serving Medicare patients, or some 2,200 facilities, will be hit with penalties averaging around $125,000 per facility this coming year, according to government estimates.
Data to assess the penalties have been collected and crunched, and Medicare has shared the results with individual hospitals. Medicare plans to post details online later and people can look up how their community hospitals performed.
From the Examiner:
Some observers believe that the new provision will place an enormous amount of added pressure on these populations, given that patients cannot be certain that their treatment will be up to par in the event of the need for readmission to the hospital after discharge. And hospitals that are already feeling the squeeze financially due to cutbacks in reimbursements from the government may be forced to limit the level of care given during readmission, resulting in patients being discharged long before they are ready.
Reminds me of the socialist British health care mess:
Hospitals may be withholding food and drink from elderly patients so they die quicker to cut costs and save on bad spaces, leading doctors have warned.
Thousands of terminally ill people are placed on a ‘care pathway’ every year to hasten the ends of their lives.
But in a letter to the Daily Telegraph, six doctors who specialise in elderly care said hospitals across the UK could be using the controversial practice to ease the pressure on resources.
The Liverpool Care Pathway, which got its name as it was developed at the Royal Liverpool Hospital in the 1990s, withholds fluids and drugs in a patient’s final days and is used with 29 per cent of hospital patients at the end of their lives.
The practise is backed by the Department of Health.
But the six experts told the Daily Telegraph that in the elderly, natural death was more often free of pain and distress.
The group warned that not all doctors were acquiring the correct consent from patients and are failing to ask about what they wanted while they were still able to decide.
Related post:
http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2012/09/27/the-reality-of-obamacare-family-premiums-increase-by-3000/
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