Advocates for safety net hospitals say the penalties unfairly punish them. The CMS, which has long insisted its methodology is fair, has finally agreed to revisit the question.
Yet not every safety net hospital is suffering under the program. At Bellevue—a storied hospital along the East River just below midtown Manhattan—hospital officials have been able to make significant strides in reducing its readmission penalties in recent years. A deeper dive into its approach outlines the contours of this complex, simmering debate, even as it reveals significant variability in the penalties' impact from hospital to hospital.
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