No Need For Change? Yeah, Right…
CBS points to a new report on the American health care system: Hearst National Investigation
New York, August 9, 2009 – An estimated 200,000 Americans will die needlessly from preventable medical mistakes and hospital infections this year, according to “Dead By Mistake,” a wide-ranging Hearst national investigation, which began reporting the findings today [www.deadbymistake.com/]. Despite an authoritative federal report 10 years ago that laid out the scope of the problem and urged the federal and state governments and the medical community to take clear and tangible steps to reduce the number of fatal medical errors,a staggering 98,000 Americans die from preventable medical errors each year and just as many from hospital-acquired infections.
And we pay twice as much per person as any other country for this mess. Understand these are people who had access to the system, and does not include the approximately 20,000 people who die because they don’t have access. Despite these numbers people still think that malpractice law suits should be suppressed. It’s rather obvious that there aren’t enough law suits to convince the system to clean up its act.
On a personal note, Excise, my “coffee and cream” tom tabby, was going to be adopted by the uncle of a neighbor. The uncle died of an infection he got in the hospital during a routine biopsy. The biopsy was benign, but the staph infection wasn’t. The uncle had health insurance overkill with Medicare, Tricare, the VA, and a local AF hospital available to him as retired military. He should have used the military or the VA.
