Medical care
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Hospitals that serve poorer populations have higher readmission rates. It is unknown whether these hospitals effectively lowered readmission rates in response to the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP). ⋯ For all hospitals, differences in pre-post trends in RSRRs varied with disease conditions. However, for the highest-penalized hospitals, the pre-post decline in RSRRs was greater for low than high dual-eligible hospitals for all penalized conditions. These results suggest that high penalty, high dual-eligible hospitals may be less able to improve performance on readmission metrics.