Insurers Stop Paying for Care Linked to Errors - WSJ.com

Insurers Stop Paying for Care Linked to Errors - WSJ.com: "Health insurers are taking a new tack in a bid to improve patient safety and reduce health-care costs: refusing to pay -- or let their patients be billed -- for hospital errors. Aetna Inc., WellPoint Inc. and other big insurers are moving to ban payments for care resulting from serious errors, including operating on the wrong limb or giving a patient incompatible blood. The companies are following the lead of the federal Medicare program, which announced last summer that starting this October, it will no longer pay the extra cost of treating bed sores, falls and six other preventable injuries and infections that occur while a patient is in a hospital. The following year, it will add to the list hospital-acquired blood infections, blood clots in legs and lungs, and pneumonia contracted from a ventilator."