May 19th, 2006 at 10:08 am
If someone buys something and it doesn’t work, they usually take it back and get a refund or exchange it.
AP reports that when the buyer is Medicare, we get double-billed for mistakes and their fixes.
(Mark McClellan) said it is hard to say exactly how often the government pays for botched health care. He also was sketchy on when the government could stop paying for medical errors, saying he would like to move aggressively and wants Congress to help.“There are several numbers out there, but these events happen daily,” he said. “The (savings) could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars a year.”
Already, Medicare has changed the way it makes payments. He said Congress gave the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services the power to cut payments when infections occur during a hospital stay. These reductions can begin in 2008.
Quality control is a fine idea but a long time coming. The delay is just another effect of artificially reducing the number of payers and removing the decision to pay from the person being treated.
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May 24th, 2006 at 8:29 am
Theoretically this is a good idea. Practically speaking, I don’t see how this can possibly save money. I would love to know how the figure “hundred of millions of dollars a year” was arrived at. The always misleading qualifier “could be” makes me think twice. To investigate all of the “errors” will require the creation of yet another monstrous bureaucracy which should eat up a lot of the “savings”. Who decides what is an error and what is just a bad outcome? Quality control is a good idea but should be left on the shoulders of JCAHO and hospital medical staffs.
I believe Medicare as it presently exists is unfixable.