Never Events have been in the US news for a while now. They are creations of health insurers and, as the name suggests, events which should never have happened had the patient had better medical care. They are also events which insurers will not pay for having treated : the hospitals which are responsible for the Never Event having occurred are expected to pay for its treatment.

The Wall Street Journal reported that following the lead of the Federal Medicare programme, ‘Aetna Inc., WellPoint Inc. and other big insurers were moving to ban payments for care resulting from serious errors, including operating on the wrong limb or giving a patient incompatible blood’.

It isn’t entirely clear how this would work in practice though.

As some doctors have pointed out, it may not actually be possible to prevent Never Events ever happening, and insurers certainly haven’t done anything in the way of creating guidelines on how to prevent them.

As one doctor says, “In 2007, WellPoint was ranked as the 35th largest corporation in America and had revenues of more than $56 billion. In 2007, Aetna was 85th on the Fortune 500 with more than $25 billion in revenues. With such vast amounts of resources, why haven’t WellPoint or Aetna funded a study or created some guidelines for healthcare providsers showing us how to prevent these “never events” 100% of the time?” [2]

What they have in essence done is found a way to cut their own costs while talking about ‘patient safety’.

Links:
[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120035439914089727.html?mod=WSJBlog
[2] http://whitecoatrants.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/more-on-never-events/