Health care law is a good start

In your article “104 jobs cut,” about Northwest Community Healthcare, only one word was left out. But it’s an important one. That word is excessive. The Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare to those who don’t like it) will punish hospitals through Medicare payment reductions only for excessive rates of patient readmissions.

Unless this is made clear, given the already highly charged and often inaccurate rhetoric that surrounds this act, I could just hear someone, after reading the article, say, “First, Obama wants to kill people off with his death panels and now he wants to bar them hospitals.” That’s not the way it is.

How is “excessive” determined, if not by presidential decree? By using national data on the average number of readmissions for various health issues. If a hospital is above the average, it gets dinged. They lose only 1 percent of their Medicare reimbursement. (It goes up to 3 percent in a few years.) Seems to me, that’s enough to make hospital executives take notice, but it’s not enough to make them unfairly deny care to anyone.

It’s a big problem: 20 percent of Medicare patients are readmitted to the hospital within 30 days of discharge. The vast majority of those could have been avoided — frequently if something simple been done, like making sure the patient really understood his medication instructions.

I’m not crazy about every aspect of the ACA myself. But it does seem to have numerous provisions like this one that look pretty sensible to me for improving health care quality while reining in costs. So I don’t understand politicians and others who simply want to repeal the whole act. It’s a start. Work together in a bipartisan way to make it better, instead of throwing it out and beginning from scratch.

Rich Wolter

Arlington Heights