Medicare Penalties Offset Bonuses for Many Hospitals This Year

Less than 800 of the 1,700 hospitals that earned bonuses for quality from Medicare this year will actually collect because those bonuses were offset by penalties for readmissions and healthcare-associated infections, reports a January 22, 2015, Kaiser Health News article. According to the article, when all of the incentive programs are combined, hospitals with more than 400 beds will receive an average bonus of $213,000 and an average penalty of about $1.2 million, and hospitals with 200 or fewer beds will receive an average bonus of $32,000 and an average penalty of about $131,000.