When doctors at Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic leave surgical instruments inside a patient — as they did three times in 2006 — they no longer charge patients or insurance companies for the mistake or for correcting the problem.
In Massachusetts, hospitals eat the bill if a surgeon takes out a patient’s kidney instead of her gallbladder — as one did last year.
Now, Colorado is poised to become the fourth state in the nation where hospitals have a “no pay” policy for serious medical mistakes.
Vermont hospitals adopted such a policy last week.
“This is really admirable,” said Mike Huotari, executive director of the Colorado Association of Health Plans, an insurance trade group.
“This is about quality of care as much as payment,” Huotari said. “This sensitizes everybody in the hospital sector and elsewhere about these events which, by definition, should never happen.”
The Colorado Hospital Association board likely will approve a policy within weeks, said Scott Anderson, a CHA vice president.
The association will ask hospitals to no longer charge patients or their insurance companies for as many as 28 preventable problems known as “never events,” he said.
“The hospitals here in Colorado have been in the forefront when it comes to quality, patient safety, transparency,” Anderson said. “This is a key effort.”
The mistakes — which include discharging a baby with the wrong parent, operating on the wrong limb or person, or giving a person the wrong blood type in a transfusion — are rare, Anderson said. There are no Colorado statistics.
In Minnesota, where state officials track errors and the population is about 9 percent larger than Colorado’s, hospitals reported 154 “adverse events” from October 2005 to October 2006, the latest year for which data is available.
Those events resulted in 24 deaths and seven cases of disability, according to the state.
In the case of the Mayo Clinic, the three instrument-left-behind errors killed no one and occurred during a total of 22,515 surgeries, according to state data.
Vermont’s hospital association announced a limited policy last week, with no payment expected for eight types of mistakes.
More comprehensive “no pay” policies were adopted in Massachusetts and Minnesota late last year, with 27 or 28 types of mistakes included.
In August, Medicare, the federal insurer of people older than 65, said it would no longer pay hospitals for eight types of serious medical errors, including surgeries on the wrong site or person.
Medicare officials said the move would save the federal government $20 million in 2009.
Lisa McGiffert, a policy analyst with the Consumers Union in Austin, Texas, said many think Medicare’s move will save far more than that. She lauded the Colorado Hospital Association’s move as “setting the right tone.”
“On the consumer level, it just makes sense that someone should not be billed for harm. That’s basic,” McGiffert said.
Still, voluntary systems like the one being considered in Colorado don’t offer comprehensive consumer protection, McGiffert said.
The Colorado Hospital Association board may take the proposal up within the next month, Anderson said.
Katy Human: 303-954-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com
