CMS easing safety-net hospitals’ readmission penalties

Editor's Note

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), on orders from Congress, is easing its annual readmission penalties on hospitals servicing low-income residents, the September 26 Kaiser Health News reports. The penalties are part of the Affordable Care Act’s effort to encourage better care.

The sanctions have been especially hard on safety-net hospitals because so many of their patients have complications after leaving the hospital through no fault of the hospital's.

This year, CMS stopped judging each hospital against all others and, instead, assigned hospitals to five peer groups with similar proportions of low-income patients. CMS then compared each hospital’s readmission rates against rates of its peer group to determine if they warranted a penalty, and how much.

Penalties against safety-net hospitals will drop by a fourth from last year, the report says.