Medicare Payment to Skilled Nursing Facilities: The Consequences of the Three-Day Rule / Ginger Zhe Jin, Ajin Lee, Susan Feng Lu.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jin, Ginger Zhe.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Lee, Ajin.

Lu, Susan Feng.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w25017.

NBER working paper series no. w25017

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Medicare Payment to Skilled Nursing Facilities

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2018.

Summary:

Medicare does not pay for a skilled nursing facility (SNF) unless a fee-for-service patient has stayed in the hospital for at least three days. Discharges after the three-day cutoff consistently result in more transfers to SNFs. Using the three-day rule as an instrument, we find that SNF discharges decrease hospital readmission for patients with comorbidities. However, for knee and hip replacement patients, we find significant increases in readmission. This perverse effect is more severe when local SNFs have lower quality. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the three-day rule may have generated extra Medicare payments to SNFs by $100-447 million per year.

Notes:

Print version record

September 2018.