Attack on hospital funding

June 18th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

Mistakes can routinely add $20,000 to patient care.

Mistakes can routinely add $20,000 to patient care. Photo: Nicholas Walker

HOSPITAL complications and mistakes cost Australia hundreds of millions of dollars a year but the new funding system will hand higher payments to hospitals for treating patients they have harmed, says health economist Stephen Duckett.

Professor Duckett has called for the introduction of measures to overcome the ”perverse” incentives for payment of hospital mistakes that can routinely add $20,000 to patient care but are largely preventable. Common avoidable problems include hospital-acquired infections, problems with cardiac and vascular implants and pressure ulcers.

The new Independent Hospital Pricing Authority has announced the price per service on which the Commonwealth will base its contribution to public hospital funding. But that figure sets the same price for a service whether or not it involves a hospital-triggered problem.

Professor Duckett said incorporating signals about the quality of care and impact on affected patients would be a step forward.

The system now being implemented ”is such that hospitals, will, in many cases, receive a higher level of payment for treating patients they have harmed”, he writes in The Medical Journal of Australia.

Tony Sherbon, the acting chief executive of the Independent Hospital Pricing Authority said there was as yet no pricing mechanism to deal with the issue.