Why Is the Federal Government Reducing Medicare Payments for 31 Florida Hospitals?
The federal government plans to cut Medicare payments to 721 hospitals across the United States, including 31 in Florida, for high patient infection and injury rates. These cuts come as a part of the new healthcare laws, which reduce Medicare payments by 1 percent in the quarter of hospitals with the highest rates of “hospital-acquired conditions.” Infections from equipment, bed sores, and falls all fall under this category.
Dr. Eric Schneider of Boston claims that many of these conditions are avoidable through simple techniques, such as entering physician orders into a computer instead of writing them down, washing hands more often and giving surgeons checklists for their procedures to follow during surgery. As simple as these techniques sound, Schneider’s experience says that they are not consistently used in many places.
The penalties were given based on three measures:
- The frequency of central-line infections caused by intravenous tubes
- Infections from catheters
- Rates of eight kinds of serious hospital complications, including collapsed lungs, surgical cuts, tears, reopened wounds and broken hips.
I Got an Infection after a Routine Surgery. Can I Hold the Physicians Liable?
During surgery, you place your life and health in the hands of another person. That person should have your full trust, but when you come out of surgery and find that you have become sick with something else due to the surgeon’s negligence, you may be understandably angry. If a hospital-acquired infection caused you harm that could have been prevented, contact the Shapiro Law Group’s Tampa Bay medical malpractice attorneys for a free evaluation.
Shapiro Law Group – Medical Malpractice Attorneys Serving the Tampa Bay Area