Aggressively collecting medical debt should join the list of medical "never events," like leaving a sponge inside a patient or operating on the wrong limb, an Oct. 27 JAMA Forum article argues.
The opinion piece was written by Dave Chokshi, MD, senior scholar at CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, and Adam Beckman, a medical student at Boston-based Harvard Medical School.
The authors also specified four other "never events" they deemed especially harmful: hospitals should never spend less on community benefits than they earn in tax breaks, never flout price transparency requirements, never provide compensation worth less than a living wage for workers, and never deliver racially segregated medical care.
"Hospitals should be places for healing, not agents of harm—and there is precedent for addressing harm in hospitals," they wrote. "Now, another category of hospital behaviors should be rendered unacceptable—a different set of never events."