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For the third year in a row, Medicare will be increasing the percent penalty for hospitals who have high readmission rates: up now to 3% in 2015. Despite efforts through the ACA and readmission reductions programs, the rate of readmissions continues to rise. Initially, Medicare attempted to stifle this by forcing hospitals to be transparent about their numbers. By making the number of readmissions public, the hope was that there would be a certain accountability and hospitals would then attempt to discern why their rates were so high. When this didn’t prove to drop the rates as much as Medicare would have hoped, they tacked on a financial penalty that hospitals would need to pay if their rates continued to rise.