Medicare Will Not Pay For Preventable Errors

This is a MONUMENTAL policy change that has received very little coverage. Why is this policy so profound? It will effect the profitability of EVERY hospital, nursing home and other long term care facility in the nation. Practically all errors are preventable. And although the aim of this new policy is to push the hospitals and long term care facilities toward more stringent adherence of current protocols and thereby reduce the number of "preventable errors," it will also drive costs through the roof for these facilities.

Medicare pays flat fees for particular treatments. Therefore, the additional testing (that will no doubt occur under this new policy) upon admission to the hospital will have to absorbed by the hospital. To avoid these additional expenses, I foresee hospitals beginning to over prescribe antibiotics in order to avoid having patients become ill with bacterial infections while in the hospital. That is only the beginning. The new guidelines could also encourage the health care facilities to falsely evaluate a patient as having more medical problems than actually exist. For example, as a precautionary measure, a blister may be documented as a "skin tear" or other type of wound in order to help the facility recoup the need for testing, additional staffing, and more extensive medical treatments that will be required because of the new guidelines.

Coding is everything when it comes to billing Medicare, and I am certain that employees of healthcare facilities will soon be receiving invitations to seminars on how to deal with the new Medicare guidelines and stay profitable. If you think there is "creative accounting" happening on Wall Street, it is nothing compared to what is an absolute necessity in the healthcare industry in order for a hospital or long term care facility to stay afloat. What this guideline will do to those facilities and the patients within them is a crime and its being perpetrated once again by George W. Bush, Richard B. Cheney, Karl un-Christian Rove, and the rest of the current administration.