Healthcare Financial News

On July 24, the House approved a resolution (H. Res. 1368) putting off any action this year on the so-called Medicare “trigger.” That section of the act contained the trigger provision that said Congress would have to reduce Medicare spending if the trustees, in two consecutive years, should predict that more than 45 percent of the program’s funding will come from the general fund. The second prediction came last year. Congress would have been required to act on the president’s savings proposals or alternatives by the end of July 2008.

Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt in a statement on July 24 took issue with the action of the House leadership, saying in a press release, “The Congressional Budget Office may have determined that budget gimmicks contained in Medicare legislation passed last week meet the technical requirements of the trigger law. But parliamentary sleight-of-hand will do nothing to resolve the enormous financial challenges presented by Medicare in the near future.”

Potentially preventable medical errors that occur during or after surgery may cost employers nearly $1.5 billion a year, according to new estimates by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

In “Impact of Medical Errors on 90-Day Costs and Outcomes: An Examination of Surgical Patients,” a study report published in the July 25 online issue of the journal Health Services Research, AHRQ researchers found that insurers paid an additional $28,218 (52 percent more) and an additional $19,480 (48 percent more) for surgery patients who experienced acute respiratory failure or postoperative infections, respectively, compared with patients who did not experience either error.

The study also found that one of every 10 patients who died within 90 days of surgery did so because of a preventable error and that one-third of the deaths occurred after the initial hospital discharge. The study was based on a nationwide sample of more than 161,000 patients age 18 to 64 in employer-based health plans who underwent surgery between 2001 and 2002. The authors used AHRQ’s patient safety indicators to identify medical errors.

The researchers conclude that studies that focus only on medical errors incurred during the initial hospital stay may underestimate the financial impact of patient safety events by up to 30 percent. Read the abstract.