Heart-Failure Hospital Stays Plunge as U.S. Saves $4 Billion
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The number of older Americans hospitalized with heart failure declined 30 percent from 1998 to 2008, saving the U.S. health insurance program for the elderly $4.1 billion annually, researchers said.
In the largest study of its kind, investigators analyzed heart-failure hospitalizations among 55 million people in the U.S. Medicare program. An extra 229,000 hospital stays among the 27.3 million people in Medicare’s fee-for-service program in 2008 would have occurred if rates had stayed the same, the report in the Journal of the American Medical Association found.