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Yikes, here’s a scary thought: Hospitals can make serious medical mistakes that could kill you. In fact, “hospital-acquired” mistakes may be responsible for as many as 98,000 deaths each year, Medicare announced recently.

Medicare says it won’t take it anymore. The government-sponsored health insurer (which sets the groundwork for just about every other private insurer’s reimbursement schedule) has added another condition to its list of preventable errors for which Medicare will no longer pay hospitals to treat, according to an article by The Associated Press:

Medicare set a new precedent last year by saying it would no longer pay hospitals for treating certain “never events” — conditions that occur as a result of hospital error. For example, if a patient were given the wrong blood type, Medicare would not pay the hospital more for the subsequent care a patient required. Originally, eight conditions were covered under the new rules, which take effect Oct. 1.

The physician-driven blog Health Care Renewal calls the Medicare proposal a “wooden-headed way” to implement pay-for-performance for hospitals and says the concept is flawed.

Are hospital errors such as surgical site infections and ventilator-associated pneumonia ever truly preventable and is the government right to shift responsibility for these conditions to the hospital?

I wonder what the new rules will end up costing our Wichita hospitals every year? Medicare, in its press release on the topic, sites an annual cost of up to $29 billion nationwide.