Medicare announced earlier this month that it would not pay "additional costs of certain preventable conditions" starting next year.

Those "preventable conditions" include bedsores, hospital-acquired infections and surgeries to retrieve instruments surgeons have left inside patients, said Jeffrey Hall, a spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

He said the rule could save taxpayers _ and cost hospitals _ about $20 million a year. There is an additional rule that states hospitals cannot pass the cost on to insurance companies or other payers.

That change in Medicare rules makes sense.

Say someone goes into a restaurant and orders a filet mignon and receives a hamburger instead, and the patron insists he gets the meal he ordered. The patron is not expected to pay for the hamburger and the filet mignon. Why should he? It was the restaurant’s fault, not the patron’s.

Why should health care be any different?

Dr. Carlton Rule, vice president for medical affairs at A.O. Fox Memorial Hospital, said he didn’t "see a problem" with penalizing hospitals for poor care.

"Some (hospitals) pay more attention if it’s a monetary reason," Rule said.

We agree that hitting the pocketbook can send a strong message.

We think the new rules will be a win-win for everybody.

Don’t let books become obsolete

The death of the book has been predicted many times throughout history. In an 1894 article for Scribner’s Illustrated, Octave Uzanne predicted that "printing ... is, in my opinion, threatened with death by the various devices for registering sound which have lately been invented."

While Uzanne’s predictions did not come to fruition, his words were echoed throughout the 20th century as film, radio, television and computer technologies made their mark on civilization.

Now an Associated Press-Ipsos poll finds that 27 percent of Americans have not read a single book in the past year.

The culprit? As usual, fingers are pointed at those same technological foes: television, movies and the Internet.

At this rate, books run the risk of being relegated to mere curiosities, collector’s items devoid of contemporary vitality.

To allow books to slip from our culture would be a tragedy. Reading is at once a sensual pleasure and a stimulating mental exercise that is incomparable with any substitute.

Young or old, it is never too late to discover the power books have to entrance, inspire and inform.

As a new school year begins, we encourage parents to spend time reading with their children.

Perhaps it is not too late to inspire a new generation to hang on to this antique technology for at least another few decades.