100,000 Patients are Killed Each Year from Shoddy Healthcare in US

[FayeforCure]

FYI,........ just spreading the word:

Preventable Medical Errors Still Kill Thousands, Cost Billions as Employers Foot Bill

Despite a landmark report a decade ago detailing the deadly nature of the U.S. health care system, a consumer group finds that little has been done to prevent errors that cost the nation $17 billion to $29 billion and kill as many as 100,000 patients annually.



May 20, 2009
Preventable Medical Errors Still Kill Thousands, Cost Billions as Employers Foot Bill

Despite a landmark report a decade ago detailing the deadly nature of the U.S. health system, a consumer group said Tuesday, May 19, that little has been done to prevent the errors that still kill as many as 100,000 patients each yearâ€"a number that the group said is a conservative estimate.

Consumers Union, which publishes the magazine Consumer Reports, published what it called a “review of the scant evidence” of the health system’s efforts to reduce preventable errors that cost the country $17 billion to $29 billion annually, a cost borne by the employers that pay for shoddy care.

The group concluded that it was impossible to gauge what, if any, progress had been made since the Institute of Medicine released its 1999 report “To Err Is Human.” Efforts to reform the system are “few and fragmented” with the exception of a few state laws requiring hospitals to provide information.

“In this report we give the country a failing grade on progress on select recommendations we believe necessary to create a health care system free of preventable medical harm,” the group said.

The report follows a similar analysis by the Leapfrog Group, an employer-sponsored organization working toward reducing medical errors. In a report last month, the group said a majority of hospitals failed to meet quality standards that reduce errors.

For example, 75 percent of hospitals do not fully meet the standards for 13 evidence-based safety practices, ranging from hand-washing to competency of the nursing staff, the Leapfrog Group said.

At the time, the 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine sent shockwaves through the medical establishment. The IOM, one of the National Academies of Sciences that advise U.S. policymakers, concluded that it would be “irresponsible to expect anything less than a 50 percent reduction in errors over five years.”

The report was followed by a task force appointed by President Bill Clinton, a $50 million allocation to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and several federal bills. Yet today, Congress has yet to pass a bill requiring hospitals to report medical errors.

In its report Tuesday, Consumers Union said the country has failed to:

● Reduce medication errors because hospitals have not widely adopted computerized prescribing and dispensing systems; the FDA has not done enough to help consumers and health practitioners avoid medication errors that stem from similar-sounding drug names and labels.

● Establish a national system suitable for reporting and tracking medical errors.

● Empower the Agency for Health Research and Quality to track national progress on patient safety.

● Raise professional standards and accountability of doctors, nurses and hospitals that commit preventable and widespread medical errors.

The 10-year anniversary of the IOM report comes amid the first concrete efforts to overhaul the health care system led by the Obama administration, which set aside billions of dollars in the federal budget for that task.

Additionally, the administration earmarked $19 billion in the economic stimulus bill to create a health information technology infrastructure that it says will reduce medication prescribing errors and other health system inefficiencies.

http://www.workforce.com/section/00/article/26/44/06.php

[jandar]

Faye, please read all of this. He makes the points that other here are trying to make. You just won't open your eyes.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/05/15/f-rfa-macdonald.html

Dear neighbours,

It looks as though you will be hearing quite a bit more about Canada in the next couple of years, so I thought we should have a word.

No, no, now, come on. I'm not going to bore you about our cultural festivals or our clean streets.

It's our health-care system you'll be hearing about. And some of what you'll hear won't be pleasant.

Now that President Barack Obama seems determined to plow ahead with that campaign promise to create affordable, universal health care, the uproar is already starting and my country's system, understandably enough, seems to be the point of reference.

As you might know, we Canadians actually have universal health care. It's a big deal for us. In fact, it's probably the thing we cite most often when we try to explain what makes us different from you (other than our apparent willingness to pay more for just about everything we buy).
Burton Cummings of the Guess Who: American woman, \Burton Cummings of the Guess Who: American woman, "sparkle someone else's eyes." (CBC)

Look, I'm going to be honest here: our system makes us feel superior. I don't know a Canadian who doesn't work it into any conversation with an American that lasts more than two minutes.
Guess who

We call our system a "safety net." We think it helps prevent the sort of crushing social inequality that most of us think is everywhere on your side of the border.

We actually love hearing about your crushing social inequality. It's a favorite Canadian topic. Remember that famous Canadian rock song, American Woman, by the Guess Who back in the '70s? Listen to the words sometime.

Anyway, while the progressives among you seem to envy our system, your conservatives hate it. And they seem to think our system is where your president is headed.

They're the ones you'll be hearing most from.

Actually, you're already hearing from them if you watch cable news. A group called Conservatives for Patients' Rights has already started running attack ads talking about the "victims of government-run health care." Most of these "victims," it turns out, are Canadian.
Rationing

The ads seem a bit over the top. But â€" and this is not going to help my popularity back home â€" there's a fair amount of truth in them, too.

One features Dr. Brian Day, a private clinic owner and former head of the Canadian Medical Association, saying that what we Canadians really have is access to "a government/state-mandated wait list."

According to Day, "the wait lists are long, the patients are languishing and suffering on wait lists."

Another features a British Columbia businessman named Don Neufeldt, who grew tired of waiting for treatment for his heart arrhythmia and headed to Oklahoma to have it fixed.

After the doctors there sewed him up, they told him it had been a life-threatening condition. In other words, he could have died on the Canadian wait list.

These ads are already provoking indignation in Canada, but really, they shouldn't. The fact is, the provincial governments that run the health-care system up there practise rationing.

Effectively, they pay doctors to decide who deserves quick treatment and who doesn't. This is not radical; Britain does it too, among others.
Promises

It is an approach that is incomprehensible to most Americans, I grant you. But Dr. Day is right: depending on your age and condition, you can suffer for quite a while in Canada before the doctor gets to you, and it's all pretty much up to the governments, which control the spending taps.

(Of course, if you're somebody important, or you know somebody important, the queue can be quite flexible. Canadian VIPs, as a general rule, don't spend much time waiting for health care).

Now, Canadian politicians are constantly promising to fix the situation and, during election campaigns, they stand in front of big backdrops promising shorter wait lines.

The queues, however, never seem to get much shorter. As one medical-industry monitoring group put it in a report last year: "Commitments (made five years ago) have been only partially met at best."
It's your money

There is something else you're going to be hearing about our system, too: we Canadians can't just reach into our pockets and pay for quick care.

Rick Baker is a Vancouver-based broker who arranges American treatment for impatient Canadians. He appears in the new ads, saying "there is only one other country in the world, that's North Korea, that follows our pattern."

In Canada, he points out, "It is against the law for a medical provider to accept payment for rendering medical services."

Again, pretty much accurate, except for the foolish North Korea comparison. There is a principle behind the ban on patients paying: it's based on the notion that you shouldn't be able to buy your way to the front of the line.

That's a difficult one to explain to Americans. Most of you are accustomed to spending your money as you see fit once the government is finished taxing you. Canadians just don't have that privilege.
Customer service

While I'm at this, dear friends, I might as well tell you a few other things about our system.

You know how doctors here sometimes give you their home or cellphone numbers and ask you to call them directly if you have a problem?

Or how they'll call you in the evening to check up on you after a treatment? Or how many others on the hospital staff here are always trying to answer your questions, instead of telling you only the doctor is permitted to speak?

It's not like that where I come from. Most of you wouldn't be happy at all with our customer service.

In the interest of balance, though, I must tell you about a few other things you won't have to deal with if President Obama gets Congress to adopt something like the Canadian system.

You won't have your health insurance cancelled on an insurer's whim, which happens here all the time, or have it denied if you or some relative was once sick. "Pre-existing conditions" don't matter at all in Canada.

You won't have some bean-counting weasel in your health group or your insurance plan conspiring to deprive you of the treatment to which you are entitled.

You won't lose your health care if you lose your job. You won't have ever-rising "co-pays" and deductibles and fees; and you won't wind up hounded by a collection agent who calls at all hours to inform you that your credit could be wrecked for life if you continue to dispute a charge on your medical bill.

Also, if you spend some time in hospital, you won't end up with months of incomprehensible invoices from everyone who provided any service, from the guy who operated the EKG machine to the guy who read the test results to the woman who administered the anaesthetic to the lab that did the blood work.

The difference between our systems is pretty simple really.

If you have money or gold-plated coverage, you're probably better off here the way things are now.

If you can't afford insurance or you're a working stiff struggling to pay your premiums, you're probably better off in Canada.

It's hard to tell exactly what system exactly President Obama has in mind. It's probably going to involve a big fight. But if you don't mind me offering some advice: don't believe everything you hear.

[FayeforCure]

Faye, please read all of this. He makes the points that other here are trying to make. You just won't open your eyes.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/05/15/f-rfa-macdonald.html

The difference between our systems is pretty simple really.

If you have money or gold-plated coverage, you're probably better off here the way things are now.

If you can't afford insurance or you're a working stiff struggling to pay your premiums, you're probably better off in Canada.

It's hard to tell exactly what system exactly President Obama has in mind. It's probably going to involve a big fight. But if you don't mind me offering some advice: don't believe everything you hear.

jandar, terrific article.

It says exactly what the healthcare reform plan is: keep your gold-plated insurance, while the working stiffs should have a choice for a public option.

Let competition rein free. No need to subsidize private insurance with tax payer dollars, when it's far less expensive to offer a public option.

The eye opening part ought to be on  opponents' part more than anything, since I am quite familiar with what opponents like to call socialized medicine,.......heck I spent many years living in Europe which as you know has a "socialized" medicine system, which many of us prefer to call a civilized medicine system.

As a matter of fact one of my five children was born in Europe.

Now tell me, were you ever aware about the 100,000 Americans who are killed by the shoddy healthcare system in the US?

I have been a healthcare advocate for a long time: patient safety, stem cell research and universal healthcare.

In 1998 I started my healthcare advocacy, and I mentioned the 100,000 figure in one of my testimonies in Tallahassee before the legislature in 2003.

But all I get back from people like you is single anecdotal stories that likely are true, but certainly don't measure up the the millions of Americans who are not, or very poorly served in the US healthcare system, which as you can see is quite deadly.

[JMac]

You're right Faye.  You changed my mind and now I'm on board with Obamacare.  Now will you go away?

[CrysG]

JMac,


Since you dislike the Canadian system how about Finland, Israel, Germany, The Netherlands, France, Italy, Singapore or Australia. And you know what's even better all of those countries have a higher rank for medical care according to WHO.

But on the bright side we beat Slovenia and Croatia.

[BridgeTroll]

Preventable Medical Errors Still Kill Thousands, Cost Billions as Employers Foot Bill

I am 100% behind this reform.  It is needed, with measurable and quantifiable goals.  These issues affect over al quality of the entire system...

● Reduce medication errors because hospitals have not widely adopted computerized prescribing and dispensing systems; the FDA has not done enough to help consumers and health practitioners avoid medication errors that stem from similar-sounding drug names and labels.

● Establish a national system suitable for reporting and tracking medical errors.

● Empower the Agency for Health Research and Quality to track national progress on patient safety.

● Raise professional standards and accountability of doctors, nurses and hospitals that commit preventable and widespread medical errors.

As always... your government... our congress is responsible for the non enforcement of some pretty obvious and relatively inexpensive reforms.

[JMac]

http://www.cato.org/pubs/bp/bp101.pdf

"To use the existing WHO rankings to justify more government involvement in health careâ€"such as via a single-payer health care systemâ€"is therefore to engage in circular reasoning because the rankings are designed in a manner that favors greater government involvement."

[BridgeTroll]

Not a big fan of UN or WHO opinions either...

Those who cite the WHO rankings typically
present them as an objective measure of the relative
performance of national health care systems.
They are not. The WHO rankings depend crucially
on a number of underlying assumptionsâ€"
some of them logically incoherent, some characterized
by substantial uncertainty, and some rooted
in ideological beliefs and values that not everyone
shares.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/bp/bp101.pdf

[CrysG]

Ah yes The Cato Institute........those wonderful people......the same people who say there is no such thing as Global Warming

[BridgeTroll]

They are Crys... how could you disagree with...

About Cato
The Cato Institute was founded in 1977 by Edward H. Crane. It is a non-profit public policy research foundation headquartered in Washington, D.C. The Institute is named for Cato's Letters, a series of libertarian pamphlets that helped lay the philosophical foundation for the American Revolution.

Cato's Mission
The mission of the Cato Institute is to increase the understanding of public policies based on the principles of limited government, free markets, individual liberty, and peace. The Institute will use the most effective means to originate, advocate, promote, and disseminate applicable policy proposals that create free, open, and civil societies in the United States and throughout the world.

[CrysG]

 A "libertarian" quasi-academic think-tank which acts as a mouthpiece for the globalism, corporatism, and neoliberalism of its corporate and conservative funders. Cato is an astroturf organization: there is no significant participation by the tiny libertarian minority. They do not fund it or affect its goals. It is a creature of corporations and foundations.

The major purpose of the Cato Institute is to provide propaganda and soundbites for conservative and libertarian politicians and journalists that is conveniently free of reference to funders such as tobacco, fossil fuel, investment, media, medical, and other regulated industries.

Cato is one of the most blatant examples of "simulated rationality", as described in Phil Agre's The Crisis of Public Reason. Arguments need only be plausibly rational to an uninformed listener. Only a tiny percentage will notice that they are being mislead. That's all that's needed to manage public opinion.


http://world.std.com/~mhuben/cato.html

[CrysG]

While your at it why don't you look up their views on smoking and immigration

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cato_Institute

[CrysG]

A senior scholar at the Cato Institute, the respected libertarian research organization, has resigned after revelations that he took payments from the lobbyist Jack Abramoff in exchange for writing columns favorable to his clients.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/17/politics/17abramoff.html?_r=1

[BridgeTroll]

While your at it why don't you look up their views on smoking and immigration

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cato_Institute

You should read the entire sourcewatch article.  I suspect you wwould or should agree with some of Cato's opinions.  I certainly disagree with some of them.

[CrysG]

I disagree with a "institute" claiming to be about "understanding of public policies based on the principles of limited government, free markets, individual liberty, and peace," when it's been proven they will write whatever you pay them to write. They have come out with some of the most laughable policies I've seen in a long time.

Philip Morris writes a check and  then they are listed as an organization the company could rely upon to help the tobacco industry. ExxonMobil writes a check and Global warming what?