The Accad and Koka Report

41. Healthcare Policy in the Crosshairs: The Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program

The Accad & Koka Report
Michel Accad, MD Anish Koka

The Hospital Readmission Reduction Program is a recent policy designed to save the government money by imposing large financial penalties on hospitals whose readmission rates for certain medical conditions are found to be higher than the national average. Could pushing policy levers on such a grand scale conceivably have negative unintended consequences?…

Our guest is Dr. Ankur Gupta, author of a 2017 JAMA article that examined mortality rates in heart failure in the aftermath of the HRRP development and implementation. Dr. Gupta is an interventional cardiology fellow at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. He holds and MD from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (New Delhi) and an interdisciplinary PhD in statistics and computational fluid dynamics from the University of Alabama.

The Accad and Koka Report podcast, hosted by two MDs, focuses on free-market approaches to medicine and health. Subscribe on iTunes, Android, Stitcher, or via RSS.