Leaders at the National Coalition of Health Care (NCHC) recently praised the updated additions of the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program (HRRP) from Medicare.
The changes feature The Help Hospitals Improve Patient Care Act (HR 5273), which is scheduled to be marked up at the House Ways and Means Committee.
“The important reforms to Medicare’s readmissions penalties, as advanced by Reps. Tiberi and McDermott, will enable Medicare to continue reducing readmission rates, while addressing disproportionate and biased penalties against providers serving lower-income populations,” NCHC President and CEO John Rother said. “Improving health care affordability requires improving the value of care delivered — especially in the communities and populations where costly chronic conditions are more prevalent. But it is a fact, documented by MedPAC and peer-reviewed studies, that HRRP’s current methodology penalizes providers serving lower-income patients, draining resources from the places that need them most. In the long-run, continuation of that methodology would generate higher rather than lower cost of care for those patients.”
The NCHC is the most diverse, oldest group that is striving to attain comprehensive health system reform.
“This new legislation would enable CMS to place hospitals in groups for the purposes of determining penalties,” Rother said. “Hospitals would compete against those with a similar proportion of dually eligible patients. NCHC has supported just such an approach for several years, and we are pleased to see it advancing in the House today.”
