Medicare has listed preventable conditions for which it will not reimburse hospitals after October 1, 2008, thanks to a law passed by Congress. According to an article in the September 2008 issue of Consumer Reports, Medicare has been asked to clarify that patients who are harmed in hospitals (by any of eight listed preventable conditions) will not be billed for any of the additional care they might need. Nine more preventable conditions could be added to this list in 2009.

The current list includes:

* Surgical objects left in patients

* Air embolism 
* Blood incompatibility 
* Serious bedsores 
* Fractures, burns, etc. 
* Urinary tract infections from catheters 
* Vascular infections from catheters 
* Infection after heart bypass graft

A staggering 2.4 million Americans suffer each year from an error or infection that occurs while they are in the hospital for something else. Typically, the patient or Medicare and private insurance has been billed for the additional care needed to recover from hospital mistakes. The 1999 Institute of Medicine’s famed report on medical errors detailed an annual cost of $37.6 billion dollars due to these errors.

There has been an outcry from certain consumer advocates that boards of medicine fail repeatedly to discipline doctors who have had multiple settlements due to these malpractice errors, while integrative doctors continue to suffer from unreasonable attacks from competing medical groups and their licensing boards. Incredibly, practitioners suffer board action when they seek to raise the standard of care by providing science-based, cutting-edge integrative care for their patients. AAHF plays a valuable role for both patients and practitioners by protecting freedom of healthcare when practitioners offer innovative patient care.