by Jack
This headline is pretty shocking. If it were about our casualties in Afghanistan it would be intolerable or imagine if it was from terrorism, but it’s not. It’s about us alright and the shocking part is too few seem to know and fewer still care. When told, at best we get a shrug of the shoulders and a hopeless look. Now the story:
Over 13 percent of Medicare patients in the U.S. experience an adverse event each month in American hospitals, and some 15,000 of them die as a result? So says a new study from the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General.
The events are often the result of medical errors, like surgical mistakes or infections that have originated in and spread through the hospital.
“The report, which was released this month, was designed to track medical errors, determine their preventability, and then estimate the cost of those errors to Medicare plans. Medicare covers some 40 million Americans, most of them age 65 or older, though it also covers disabled patients as well as those suffering from end-stage renal disease.
The news is startling, particularly since the report points out that 44 percent of adverse incidents occurring in hospitals are avoidable. And all-together, these adverse events are costing Medicare more than $300 million a month.”
In a separate study done earlier by the Hearst foundation, we find even more alarming confirmation that something is going terribly wrong in medicine; “The Dead By Mistake report concludes that a staggering 98,000 Americans die from preventable medical errors each year and just as many from hospital-acquired infections.
Ten years ago, a highly-publicized federal report, To Err Is Human, highlighted the alarming death toll from preventable medical injuries and called on the medical community to cut it in half in five years. Its authors and patient safety advocates believed that its release would spur a revolution in patient safety.
But Hearst’s report finds that the federal government and most states have made little or no progress in improving patient safety through accountability mechanisms or other measures. According to the Hearst investigation, special interests worked to ensure that the key recommendations in the report – most notably a mandatory national reporting system for medical errors – were never implemented.”
Read the latest report, click here.
Eh … I can’t get too worked up over this. People who get carried off by hospital borne infections were on their way out anyway.
It doesn’t really amount to much more than natural causes. (Though it certainly is an admirable goal, tryin’ to keep them places cleaner.)
If you don’t want the hospital to kill you … stay away from the hospital … but you are going to die. There is nothing to be done about that.
And, as usual, Medicare, per se, had got nothing to do with none of this.
Libby, it was because of medicare that they were able to do the study. As for staying away from the hospital, good point. I’m cancelling all my plans for getting sick as of right now!