Hospital readmission penalties seem to have been working as intended, by driving down 30-
day hospital readmissions and saving Medicare roughly $2.3 billion between 2010 and
2016. The unintended consequence, however, was that hospitals serving the poorest of
the poor were the most frequently penalized. Medicare has made changes to mitigate
that, but safety-net hospitals still struggle with reducing hospital readmissions largely attributable to social determinants of care, and they still risk penalties that could push them over the fiscal
edge.
The gradually maturing discipline of affective neuroscience is beginning to showcase emotion as much more than a simple reaction to stimuli. Biologists are beginning to accurately predict behavioral states from emotional databanks. Psychologists are collaborating with technologists and neurologists to define a new wave of behavioral health studies, and the results may affect us sooner than we think.
