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The policy: Medicare will stop paying for eight types of preventable medical errors that occur in hospitals.
Goal: To push hospitals to improve patient safety. Savings would be modest, perhaps $20 million a year from a budget of about $400 billion.
When it starts: On Oct. 1, Medicare will start collecting hospital admission data. On Oct. 1, 2008, Medicare will stop paying the costs of errors, and hospitals may not charge the patients for those procedures.
Errors not covered: Leaving objects in patients during surgery; causing air embolisms, or tiny bubbles, in the bloodstream; giving a patient the wrong type of blood; allowing patients to fall; permitting pressure ulcers, or bedsores, to develop; allowing urinary tract infections associated with catheters; allowing vascular infections associated with catheters; and causing mediastinitis, an infection after heart surgery.
Source: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
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