After 40 years of rewarding mistakes, Medicare will now force providers to bear the cost of their own errors

“More than 60 years ago, markets devised health plans that discourage medical errors by forcing doctors and hospitals to bear the financial costs of all such errors. You know them as plans like Group Health Cooperative and Kaiser Permanente. Doctors and patients who choose those plans tend to like them, and the plans receive high marks for quality, which suggests the financial incentives they use serve patients better. 

Why does it take Medicare more than 40 years to take such baby steps?  Especially when the market developed a solution to this problem over 60 years ago?  

The answer is that Medicare — like all universal-coverage schemes — is operated by the government, and government resists innovation. In this case, resistance to innovation kills.”  - Read more at the National Review Online.