Billed as an effort to save patients' lives, Medicare will no longer pay for eight hospital "never events" beginning next Wednesday, October 1.
What's a never event? Simply put, it's an event that should never happen in a hospital -- except that they do -- and it's truly a misnomer. Personally I think they should have been called "shouldn't ever" events.
The Medicare list isn't long. (It's derived from a much longer list of 28 never events.) And most professionals and patients would agree that the events like wrong-site surgeries or transfusion of the wrong blood type should never happen. There is also no excuse for them.
Among those no-longer-will-be-paid-for events, however are hospital-acquired infections -- infections like MRSA and C.Diff that hospitals have so-far not been able to control very well. And there's the rub. Medicare won't pay for them after next week, and hospitals will be required to eat the cost of treating patients who acquire these infections themselves.
Oh -- and Medicare will save $22 billion in the first year. Yes - that's billion with a B.
The real problem is a short term one -- a short few years, I'm guessing. There are any number of unintended consequences that will result from this new policy -- initially all bad for patients.
Do I think the policy will be good in the long run? Absolutely. Forcing hospitals and their personnel to be more diligent about patient safety can only be good.
What I fear, however, is that during these next few years patients will pay the price by getting sent home too early or by finding their bills increased in very surreptitious ways.
The best we patients can do is to be aware of the potential consequences, and prepare to deal with them if they come about.
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