"Never pay" PA policy for never events...

From the Philadelphia Inquirer article:

In 2006, 11 hospital patients in Southeastern Pennsylvania died after getting transfusions with the wrong blood type. An additional 40 died after medication errors, and four more after being accidentally burned during their stays, according to an Inquirer computer analysis of hospital billing records.

Such deaths, nearly 1,500 all told, are a rough estimate of what the Rendell administration would initially find if it applied its new Medicaid policy on medical errors to all 708,657 hospital admissions in 2006 from Philadelphia, Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery Counties.

Under that policy, the state will stop paying hospitals for the added costs of care for Medicaid patients that result from serious, avoidable medical mistakes.

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