patrick.net

On the good news side, the price of pitchforks has gone down.

Linked BMJ article: "Medical error—the third leading cause of death in the US"

For more about this on PatNet, see my prior Post on fraudulent hospital admissions and "medical misadventure".

"Medical errors are third-leading cause of death in United States
***
"We believe this understates the true incidence of death due to medical error because the studies cited rely on errors extractable in documented health records and include only inpatient deaths."
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The study's authors cited the case of a young woman who was recovering well from transplant surgery, but then was readmitted to the hospital "for non-specific complaints that were evaluated with extensive tests, some of which were unnecessary, including a pericardiocentesis."

"The death certificate listed the cause of death as cardiovascular," they said.
***
They said there are three strategies which should be deployed to reduce the numbers of deaths from medical error. "Making errors more visible when they occur so their effects can be intercepted; having remedies at hand to rescue patients; and making errors less frequent by following principles that take human limitations into account," the authors wrote."

Linked BMJ article: "Medical error—the third leading cause of death in the US"

For more about this on PatNet, see my prior Post on fraudulent hospital admissions and "medical misadventures," and the "eye-popping" revenue increases that result. Also, avoid American hospitals, especially in July.

Doctors now killing more people than ISIS!
Why won't our government protect us from these white-coated terrorists?!

It's a sure sign of institutional racism against whites.

It's all Obama's fault!!!

Alcohol, drug abuse and frying anything that moves/grows has consequences. From satanist social darwinist perspective, certain people are just not fit enough.

dublin hillz says

Alcohol, drug abuse and frying anything that moves/grows has consequences. From satanist social darwinist perspective, certain people are just not fit enough.

That's racist!

Straw Man says

against whites.

Statistically, the drop in white life expectancy seems to result partly from the bipartisan combination of mandatory insurance and the "war on drugs," which has pushed more people onto Rx opioids including the fraudulently marketed Oxycontin, which becomes a gateway to heroin addiction. (In a deal with regulators during the W administration, Purdue executives admitted the Oxycontin fraud but avoided jail, and in exchange they caused shareholders to pay a "record" fine amounting to part of the profit the company had made selling the drug.) In the context of the "war on drugs" and fraudulently marketed Oxycontin, subsidized insurance became a major risk factor for heroin addiction, as Mexican transnational cartels figured out very quickly. Obamneycare made those insurance policies mandatory, with "no lifetime caps," including coverage for "rehab" programs that have a 90% failure rate, while continuing the drug war. Result: more spending, shorter lives. It is too early to know what killed Prince, but I suspect that opioid addiction might turn out to have been at least a contributing factor.

You can read more here. here, here, and here, among other places.

curious2 says

Statistically, the drop in white life expectancy seems to result primarily from the bipartisan combination of mandatory insurance and the "war on drugs," which has pushed more people onto Rx opioids including the fraudulently marketed Oxycontin, which becomes a gateway to heroin addiction

Sorry, I don't follow: how exactly having a medical insurance pushes people into Rx drug addiction?

I heard a lecture from a DEA agent years ago. She plain stated that the major drug companies set up "generic" factories, mostly in Canada, but wherever they could to promote the "plain brown wrapper" mail order drug trade.

The lecture was depressing, and she made the job sound not just impossible but futile.

Straw Man says

Sorry, I don't follow: how exactly having a medical insurance pushes people into Rx drug addiction?

If you read the links, you'd see the connection. The Mexican transnational cartels figured it out first, and capitalized on it. Statistically, you can see the results, as insurance is a major risk factor. I'll explain the mechanism step by step.

First, as background, you should be aware that generic morphine tablets cost less than $0.10 where they can be bought legally. That gives you a baseline cost/value proposition.

Next, enter Rx Oxycontin, which sells for $2, a 2,000% markup, plus the cost of the Rx process.

If people had a free market choice between Oxycontin and morphine, both clearly labeled as addictive, then very few people would choose to pay 20x more for Oxycontin. (Brand name Bob might quibble, but he's lost his memory and his self-contradictory comments on PatNet show he can't even keep track of his own opiate and opioid history.)

The drug war and subsidized insurance combine to remove morphine from the shelf and push Oxycontin prescriptions. Drug manufacturers pay doctors, and incentivize them in other ways (e.g. mandatory continuing education), to drive prescriptions in a more lucrative direction. The linked reports include young people who had been prescribed Oxycontin for sports injuries when they were kids on CHIP, for example. When you're making a 2,000% markup, protected by government, you can share out that markup to a whole patronage network of politicians, lobbyists, salesmen, and so on, to get your product subsidized via insurance and keep your competition criminalized.

So, Oxycontin prescriptions were pushed to people with insurance, which made the Oxycontin seem "free" or at least "affordable," and many of those people were told fraudulently that Oxycontin supposedly wasn't addictive. Many got addicted. Poor people with prescriptions could sell their quality-controlled Oxycontin for cash and buy cheaper street heroin, increasing their dose. Poor people whose prescriptions had run out could buy street heroin to continue their addiction. Rich people had a choice, paying cash for somebody else's clean Oxycontin or buying heroin, which the cartels can reportedly deliver to practically any door within 20 minutes. Either way, the more people you put on insurance, the more people you can put on Oxycontin, and the more heroin addicts you end up with.

Ironman says

..."If this rate is applied to all registered US hospital admissions in 2013 it translates to over 400,000 deaths a year, more than four times the IOM estimate."

Yes, I searched for that text and found it here.

Very informative, thank you Curious2.

Ironman says

..."If this rate is applied to all registered US hospital admissions in 2013 it translates to over 400,000 deaths a year, more than four times the IOM estimate."

See.. you stand a 40x chance of dying using your Obamacare policy than from a firearm, but we need to ban all firearms according to Obama and Hillary.... Go figure....

If you get hit by a car, you kind of have no choice but go to a hospital. comparing that to gun deaths makes zero logical sense, but is par for the course for a moronic twit like you.

Someone seems to believe falsely that American hospitals deal primarily with emergencies. In reality, emergency departments account for less than 10% of hospital revenue, and since EMTALA was enacted, we are seeing the planning of new hospitals with no emergency department at all, so they can cash in on infinite elective procedures ("no lifetime caps!") without being bothered by pesky crash victims who might not even have insurance.