Sat, Oct 4, 2008 (2:07 a.m.)

Once in a while a Medicare patient will go to a hospital for treatment but suffer an additional malady in the process. These hospital-acquired conditions could include a sponge or other foreign object left in a person after surgery, an incompatible blood transfusion, or urinary tract infections caused by catheters.

Even though the medical facility was responsible, it would bill the federal health insurance program for the error. Besides the unfortunate patients, the ultimate losers in these scenarios are taxpayers.

It shouldn’t be that way, something Congress to its credit realized and required the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to address.

On Wednesday the agency that runs Medicare for elderly and disabled recipients began withholding reimbursement to hospitals for certain mistakes made by those facilities. The new regulation also bars hospitals from billing Medicare patients directly for those miscues. That means the hospitals will have to absorb those costs.

As The New York Times reported, the savings to taxpayers will be only about $21 million a year, a paltry sum compared with the $110 billion Medicare spent on inpatient care last year.

But the new regulation should send a strong message to hospitals that they will be held accountable for substandard medical procedures that could have been prevented. The regulation is part of a larger strategy by the Medicare agency to encourage greater patient safety in hospitals.

“While it may be some time before we can begin to assess the real impact of these steps on patient care, we are hearing from hospitals around the country about efforts they have undertaken in the past year to improve staff training and other measures to reduce the incidence of these preventable conditions,” said Kerry Weems, the agency’s acting administrator.

Patients have every right to expect professionalism when they go to hospitals. Medical facilities that develop a reputation for maltreatment run the risk of losing business and being shut down by regulators. The Medicare regulation should encourage hospitals to make patient safety one of their highest priorities.