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I wrote a bit about Medicare refusing to pay for medical errors earlier in the day, but I think this quote more clearly illustrates the absurdity of the situation:
If an auto mechanic accidentally breaks your windshield while trying to repair the engine, he would never get away with billing you for fixing his mistake. On Wednesday, Medicare will start applying that logic to American medicine on a broad scale when it stops paying hospitals for the added cost of treating patients who are injured in their care.Medicare, which provides coverage for the elderly and disabled, has put 10 “reasonably preventable” conditions on its initial list, saying it will not pay when patients receive incompatible blood transfusions, develop infections after certain surgeries or must undergo a second operation to retrieve a sponge left behind from the first. Serious bed sores, injuries from falls and urinary tract infections caused by catheters are also on the list.Officials believe that the regulations could apply to several hundred thousand hospital stays of the 12.5 million covered annually by Medicare. The policy will also prevent hospitals from billing patients directly for costs generated by medical errors.Yep, Medicare, like almost all insurers, would pay for a second operation in which the surgeon retrieved a sponge he left somewhere to the right of the patient's liver. And there's a reason for it. If they wouldn't pay, and the doctor wouldn't do the operation for free, then the patient would be left with a sponge in their gut. A small insurer, in fact, probably still couldn't refuse to pay for such an operation, as the surgeons wouldn't eat the cost and the patient would raise hell. Or maybe the patient would then sue the doctor and we'd hear a lot about the "medical malpractice" crisis...
