Patients still stuck with bill for medical errors

That includes Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights, Ill., where president and chief executive Bruce Crowther said hospitals are moving in the right direction toward transparency. Punitive measures such as withholding funding are not likely to be effective, he said.

"I don't know that we'd work any harder or faster than we do now," he said.

Last summer, the American Hospital Association urged its members to develop voluntary guidelines for nonpayment, noted Nancy Foster, the agency’s vice president for quality and safety policy.

“When think that when such an event occurs, when it’s preventable and when it’s in the control of the hospital and it clearly was a mistake, hospitals should not be expecting to receive payment to treat the problems,” she said.

Improving safety is the goal, said Andy Davidson, president and chief executive of the Oregon Hospital Association. Last week, the agency joined neighboring Washington in announcing its hospitals would no longer charge for any of the 28 errors included on the NQF list.

“At the end of the day, this is really a path toward accountability on a lot of fronts,” he said. “This is about hospitals regaining that position of being a trusted community asset.”

If errors are so rare, why charge?
Consumers should keep in mind that preventable, serious errors are very rare, accounting for about .02 percent to .03 percent of all hospital admissions, Davidson and officials across the country said. In Washington state in 2007, for instance, that meant there were 193 adverse events out of 630,000 admissions.

That very scarcity ought to prompt doctors, hospitals and other providers to make sure that patients injured by mistakes aren’t charged for the ordeal, said Kevin Baccam.

“He billed me for both surgeries,” Baccam said, still incredulous at the thought. “If I would not have reviewed my insurance bill, I would not have caught it.”

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