Medicare’s pay-for-performance incentives, that financially prerogative or retaliate hospitals depending on either they strike specific numerical targets in matters such as curbing quadriplegic readmissions, are carrying a unintended side outcome of holding dollars divided from a nation’s historically cash-strapped safety-net hospitals and boosting a income of wealthier hospitals that offer an economically better-off studious base.
That’s one of a conclusions of an evidence-based editorial in today’s [Tuesday, Sept. 8] Annals of Internal Medicine.
The article, patrician “Collateral Damage: Pay-for-Performance Initiatives and Safety-Net Hospitals,” is created by dual heading health-system researchers, Drs. Steffie Woolhandler and David U. Himmelstein, professors during a City University of New York School of Public Health and lecturers in medicine during Harvard Medical School.
“Medicare’s P4P [pay-for-performance] program, that does not adjust for patients’ socioeconomic status, assumes that bonuses and penalties will poke poor providers to urge or see their patients quit to higher-quality options,” Woolhandler and Himmelstein write. “However, when peculiarity problems are due to a hospital’s financial trouble and patients can't go elsewhere, penalizing low scorers might good retaliate patients and intensify peculiarity disparities. Prescribing a starvation diet for safety-net hospitals that are strapped for money and are peculiarity challenged creates no clarity unless a idea is to
