Suppose you had an operation in a hospital, and that just before you were released, you were furnished with a prescription and told that you should have a checkup with your doctor in a couple of weeks.
Now, whose responsibility is it to see that you take the prescribed medicine and that you go to the doctor for your checkup? It's yours, of course! Or at least common sense tells us it should be.
But now, hospitals are going to be paid less for the Medicare patients they treat if a relatively high percentage of their discharged Medicare patients are readmitted in a fairly short period of time.
In many cases, the penalties will be assessed against the hospitals even if they had nothing to do with the reason why a patient was readmitted -- such as a patient who won't take his medicine or go to the doctor as advised. The Washington Post reported that the idea of the penalties is to get hospitals "to make sure patients see their doctors and fill their prescriptions."
But since when is that the hospital's duty once a patient is released and out of the hospital's care? Hospitals cannot force patients to take their prescriptions and to set up follow-up appointments with their doctors.
And hospitals simply do not have the resources to hire lots of new employees to make home visits to all their discharged patients to ensure that they are taking their medicines or scheduling checkups.
This is just one more example of the federal government intruding in an area that clearly should be a matter of personal and family responsibility.