Two items stood out when employees of UnityPoint Health-Meriter first saw the total cost of knee and hip replacement surgery for its Medicare patients.
One was that some physicians sent patients to nursing homes after surgery much more often than others — at a cost of $550 to $600 a day, a decision that costs roughly four times as much as home health care.
Another was that many nursing homes and other skilled-nursing facilities kept the patients for the full 21 days covered by Medicare, no matter how quickly the patients recovered.
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