Preferred Health Systems, Kansas' largest health insurer, announced last week that it will stop reimbursing hospitals for costs related to avoidable medical complications, the Wichita Eagle reports. Beginning Oct. 1, treatment for "never events" -- including objects left in patients during surgery, use of the wrong blood type during a transfusion and certain infections -- will no longer be covered by the insurer. On the same date, Medicare also will stop paying hospitals the higher rates for the increased cost of care that results from such mistakes.

"The whole premise behind all this is to put hospitals on notice that these conditions and events need to stop to really solidify patient safety and (to) encourage hospitals to approve quality day in and day out, one patient at a time," Preferred Health Chief Operating Officer Brad Clothier said. He added, "It really has to do with the focus we have on patient safety."

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas has said it will formalize its long-standing policy of refusing payment for avoidable complications effective Jan. 1, 2009. BCBS spokesperson Mary Beth Chambers said, "We really feel that Kansas hospitals and Kansas providers are doing the best they can for patient safety. We feel very strongly that we do not want to pay for these so-called never events ... and we don't believe providers in our network expect us to pay for those events."

Hewitt Goodpasture, vice president for clinical quality and patient safety at Via Christi Wichita Health Network, said, "It's true that in the past, hospitals got the benefit of the doubt -- to the extent hospitals get paid for these -- and were paid as though none of them were preventable. Now they're paying for them as though all of them were preventable, that's [not] true." He added, "I think there's some validity to doing it -- I'm not opposed to doing it, but I'm opposed to calling these things 'never events.' It may lead to doctors saying they're not going to operate on this patient, it's too risky. It can have unintended consequences on patients if it gets real punitive" (Atwater, Wichita Eagle, 7/28).