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Area Patients’ Rights Group Applauds Medicare’s Refusal KINGSTON, Pa. (August 20, 2007) – The president of an area group that advocates for the legal rights of injured patients today applauded new Medicare rules that will deny payment to hospitals for patient-care costs arising from preventable medical errors. “It’s well past time someone finally drew a line in the sand,” said Attorney David I. Fallk, president of The Committee for Justice for All. “The United States has the only health-care system in the world that profits by injuring patients or making them sicker. The new Medicare rules remove the financial rewards resulting from mistakes and place the responsibility for patient safety where it belongs ― on doctors and hospitals.” The New York Times reported on Sunday that Medicare will no longer pay the extra costs of treating preventable errors, injuries and infections that occur in hospitals. (READ STORY) Among the conditions affected by the new Medicare rules are bedsores, injuries caused by falls and infections resulting from the prolonged use of catheters. Medicare also says it will no longer pay for the treatment of “serious preventable events” like leaving a sponge or other object in a patient during surgery and providing a patient with incompatible blood or blood products. In a landmark 1999 study, the Institute of Medicine estimated that as many as 98,000 people die each year due to preventable medical errors. Other studies have put the estimate much higher. According to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a Boston-based organization focused on preventing medical errors, patients suffer some degree of harm 15 million times a year in the United States — a rate of more than 40,000 a day. In Pennsylvania alone, hospital-acquired infections account for $3.2 billion in additional health-care spending annually. Nationwide, 90,000 Americans die every year due to hospital-acquired infections, according to federal estimates, and more than half those infections may be preventable, experts say. “The human and financial toll of preventable errors and hospital-acquired infections in the United States is staggering,” said Fallk. “In the end, the health-care delivery system should not profit from its shortcomings while the rest of us have to pay for it in the form of higher costs for health insurance, health-care services and social programs. Our health care system should have long ago put an end to preventable errors, and the Medicare rule changes are a huge step in the right direction.” Fallk said federal regulators and lawmakers must ensure that hospitals don’t respond to the Medicare initiative by denying care to Medicare patients or making patients pay the costs of mistakes or infections. “Federal officials have to make sure that patients don’t end up short-changed yet again,” he said. The Committee for Justice for All is a non-profit Northeastern Pennsylvania advocacy group fighting to preserve the integrity of the civil justice system and the Constitutional right of all Americans to trial by jury. ### |
