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The staggering cost of health care - and how the nation will pay for it in the future - is at the top of the national debate today. Most solutions are costly, complex and controversial. But here's a relatively small piece of the puzzle that's a no-brainer: reducing preventable errors that drive up hospital bills.

More than a year ago, Medicare and Medicaid stopped paying for certain hospital errors ranging from catheter-associated urinary tract infections to leaving surgical instruments inside a patient. But if a patient had private insurance - or, worse yet, no insurance - hospitals have been free to bill patients for the cost of treating these medical mistakes.

That would change under a bill that's cleared the state Senate and is now before the Assembly. The bill would prevent hospitals from charging anyone for serious medical errors. The legislation would also require the state to make public individual hospitals' errors. Currently, hospitals are required to report preventable life-threatening mistakes, but the state releases only the total numbers - not data for individual hospitals. Under the bill, the state would publish how often certain errors occur at each hospital.

Hospitals are never going to be mistake-free - not as long as human beings are involved. Still, increasing transparency and requiring hospitals to assume the costs of preventable errors would ratchet up the pressure on hospitals to implement every possible safety control.

AARP has been lobbying hard for the bill. The numbers, AARP says, are staggering: Hospitals can charge you $62,000 if doctors leave a surgical instrument inside your body and then have to go and retrieve it. Hospitals can charge you $46,000 if you get the wrong blood type during a transfusion.

Of course, can and do are two different things. The New Jersey Hospital Association says hospitals do not normally charge for egregious errors, such as amputating the wrong limb.

Still, it would be nice to have the prohibition built into law.

Hospital errors, of course, are more than a matter of money. Some 98,000 Americans die every year from preventable medical mistakes, according to the AARP. And the suffering caused to patients is immeasurable.

The bill appears to have widespread support. The Senate passed it unanimously. And many of the concerns of the hospital association have been addressed, according to NJHA Policy Director Jessica Cohen.

The Assembly should act soon on this relatively simple way to address one small piece of the health care puzzle.

2 comments:

• Determined (0) posts 11:16 am

  Hospitals do cause infections in putting in iv's and ports in patients. Most of the problem is in letting students experiment on patients. Our family has had many incidents of this, even so far as a technician dropping a port on the floor and putting it right back in the patient. Doctors fighting over a patients bed as to the right procedure to stitch a port that was severely bleeding. see www.kidneytransplantkiller.com

• microbeach (0) posts 3:29 am

  It is important to remember that when hospitals began first taking in patients, they were places where people went to die. Now because of the many fantastic medical advances everyone entering a hospital expects to live. Urinary catheter related infections are not medical mistakes since the very act of placing a catheter can result in infection. Most time it is a necessary procedure. One of the reasons that hospitals do have medical mistakes is the same as the reason mistakes are made in any situation. That is, hospital personal are understaffed and overworked. Human nature is such that this kind of environment increases the number of errors that occur. Also because salaries and benefits are so poor there is a shortage of well trained hospital personal. It cost money to keep patients alive and we should be willing to pay what is necessary for the well being of the patient.

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