HARRISBURG PATRIOT-NEWS EDITORIAL: When you go to a hospital, there’s always a small chance the hospital is going to make an avoidable mistake that delays your recovery or requires further treatment.
Putting you on a catheter, for example, can cause infection in the urinary tract – infections like that happened about 290,000 times in 2013, according to federal data. About 1 million times, US patients suffered bedsores, according to the same data. Both problems are easily avoided with proper care.
That’s why the federal government has started keeping track of those mistakes and other preventable errors and penalizes hospitals with the worst records. Make too many mistakes (known as “hospital acquired conditions”), and a hospital loses 1 percent of the money it is due from Medicare, the federal health coverage for senior citizens… (more)
NEWSLANC EDITOR: This is part of the Affordable Care Act, as are so many other vital reforms reported elsewhere over the past few days. We will write about them this weekend with the hope that those who oppose “Obamacare” while refusing to learn anything about it will finally take some notice.
