On the heels of news that Medicare will stop reimbursing for medical errors, The New York Times notes a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association finding that Medicare pays hospitals more money for patients who get infected in hospitals than for patients who make it in and out of the hospital without complications.
The study focused on urinary tract infections, which affect 1 million people at a cost of $400 million annually. And given the financial incentives in place, it's easy to see why those numbers are so high: One Colorado Hospital cited in the study, for example, received a 63 percent increase in reimbursement for heart attack patients who had complicated infections over the repayment for a heart attack patient who recovered without complications.
Of course, as the study's authors note, doctors and health care workers don't set out to make people sick just to earn a buck. And certainly, some errors can't be prevented. At the same time, as the New York Times quotes the study's authors as saying, "When properly designed, financial incentives should provide rewards for desired clinical outcomes, not hospital-acquired harms.''