Shocking Study Suggests Major Obamacare Rule KILLED People

If you want an extremely low danger example of how a government run health system may not always be the best idea I will tell you briefly about an incident that happened to myself a few years ago involving a VA hospital.

The short version is that a friend of mine had to be admitted to treat a MRSA infection a couple of years ago and when he had to go to the emergency room at his local VA he had to wait nearly four hours to just be put to where he could be seen after having come back there the week before and the antibiotics they gave him the first time didn’t work.

He spent another four hours in the ER once they got him back to see someone and then another couple of hours after they admitted him before he got up to a room. He has to go to the VA for his health care unless he is bleeding from every hole.

On the other hand, when his wife had to go to the emergency room when she got bit by some kind of insect and her foot swelled up to three times its normal size when she went to a normal emergency room she was seen, treated and discharged within an hour.

Which is why there are a million other reasons why government run health care is not always the best option

Via Western Journal:

An Affordable Care Act program that penalized hospitals for readmitting Medicare patients within a month of being discharged may have led to increased mortality rates among adults who experienced pneumonia and heart failure, according to a study published Tuesday.

The program was changed in September so that hospitals serving lower-income, older adults were not hit as hard by the penalties, but the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that damage may have already been done, and not just to hospitals’ bottom lines.

The Affordable Care Act of 2010, also known as Obamacare, included a program that imposed financial penalties on hospitals with too-high readmission rates for patients with heart failure, heart attacks or pneumonia starting in 2012. It was supposed to encourage better care. But the program was not popular, wrote Reason managing editor Peter Suderman:

Hospital groups have argued that these payments are punitive and unfair, particularly to so-called safety net hospitals that serve the poorest, sickest patients. These patients tend to have higher readmissions rates, and the hospitals that treat them were more likely to be hit with payment reductions.

The Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program was established because “unnecessary readmissions” cost Medicare nearly $18 billion a year, according to Reason. HRRP cut readmission rates by 3 percentage points for heart failure, 3.6 percentage points for heart attacks and 2.3 percentage points for pneumonia between 2010 and 2016, according to NPR.

But those decreases may have come at the cost of patients’ lives, according to the study. The HRRP’s implementation was associated with a “significant increase” in post-discharge mortality trends among Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized for heart failure and pneumonia, the study’s authors wrote.