Hospitals will have to pay for their mistakes.(View point)

In 2004, the very hospitals where Dorothy Etheridge picked up infections and a bed sore were reimbursed by Medicare for the extra care she needed to recover from them. Etheridge, 73, a retired mental-healthcare worker from New Hampshire, had a diagnosis of treatable lung cancer. The bed sore and infections added to her suffering and required significant hospital care in the last year of her life.

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Consumers Union estimates that more than 2.4 million Americans suffer each year from an error or infection that occurs while they're in the hospital for something else. Medicare, private insurers, or the patients are typically billed for the additional care they need to recover from hospital mistakes.

That's about to change for the more than 40 million Medicare enrollees. Congress passed a law requiring the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to start identifying preventable "hospital-acquired conditions" for which Medicare would no longer pay. The idea is to push hospitals to improve care by making them foot the bill when they err.

Medicare has listed eight preventable conditions for which it will not reimburse hospitals after Oct. 1, 2008, and is proposing nine more conditions to be added in 2009. The effects could widen as private insurers and state-funded health insurance programs begin to follow Medicare's lead.

Some of the eight have been dubbed "never events" because they should never happen. They include leaving sponges ...