No One Ever Talks About What Probably the 2nd Leading Cause of Death: Low Quality Health Care

[toddmiller]

80 Links on the Topic

No one ever talks about this but research suggests that 400,000 or more people die each year as a result of low quality care. Only 50,000 deaths are attributed to lack of health insurance. Medical errors are a much larger piece of the pie. Perhaps have of those "errors" are the result of hospital infections caused by people not washing their hands. Not an unsolvable problem. A second major problem is medication errors which Obamacare could potentially help with by requiring people to use the new computer systems to combat errors. Thus, far the administration has rolled back those regulations. How can you roll back regulations that save lies?

[preventivePhD]

1. That's correct

I worked in Preventive Medicine for many years and myself and my colleagues always wondered about that.

[hrmjustin]

3. Welcome to DU!

[bemildred]

2. From the current Harper's Index:

Average number of times each week US surgeons operate on the wrong patient or body part: 40
Rank of preventable medical errors among the leading causes of death in the United States: 3

[toddmiller]

4. Harper's Data May Be Old

Although Harper doesn't indicate how they came up with their numbers at least as far as I can tell, it seems to me that they are probably using the 90,000 medical errors per year data from the heavily cited Leap study that is a decade old. I think it would be ranked 1 or 2 based on more current data such as the Medicare survey conducted by the NIH.

[bemildred]

5. They give the following sources for those two:

20. Joint Commission Center for Transforming Health Care (Oakbrook Terrace, IL)
21. Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality (Baltimore)

Not that I really want to argue with you, you take your life in your hands when you see a doctor these days. It's caveat emptor and very expensive too.

I do enjoy the pharmaceutical commercials, they are such self-parodies with all the warnings droning on in the background while smiling people without a care in the world are so happy happy happy because of the drug in question.