Insurers Stop Paying for Care Linked to Medical Errors

Health insurers are taking a new tack in a bid to improve patient safety and reduce health-care costs: refusing to pay — or let their patients be billed — for hospital errors. Aetna, Inc. and WellPoint, Inc. and other large insurers are moving to ban payments for care resulting from significant physician and hospital errors, including operating on the wrong limb or giving a patient incompatible blood.  The companies are following the lead of the federal Medicare program, which announced last summer that starting this October, it will no longer pay the extra cost of treating bed sores, falls and six other preventable injuries and infections that occur while a patient is in a hospital. The following year, it will add to the list: hospital-acquired blood infections, blood clots in legs and lungs, and pneumonia contracted from a ventilator.  Private insurers are looking first at banning reimbursements for only the gravest mistakes. But health-insurance executives say it is only a matter of time before the industry also stops paying for some of the more common and less clear-cut problems that Medicare is tackling, such as hospital-acquired catheter infections or blood poisoning.  Some hospitals and others are concerned that the new strategy could drive up medical costs in other ways as hospitals absorb or pass on the expense of introducing the safety and screening procedures needed to help avoid mistakes.  Ultimately, insurers say, the efforts will trigger safety improvements and savings for patients.

To read the entire Wall Street Journal article, please click on the link below:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120035439914089727.html

For more information on defending medical malpractice, nursing home and general liability matters in Florida contact Howard Citron at Citron & Associates, P.A. – www.citronlegal.com.