Jul 22, 2007
When Medicine Kills
As important as it is to move America to a single-payer heathcare system that eliminates the administrative costs of profit-driven insurance companies, it will do little good if we do not simultaneously change the way medicine is practiced in this country.
This flies in the face of a basic assumption in the current debate: that for all of its expense, and despite those millions of uninsured, the American medical system (AMS) is the best in the world. Saudi princes, we’re told, come here for their coronary bypass operations. Canadians eschew their long waits and slip over the border for hip replacements. Supposedly, every sick person in the world would prefer an American hospital over the second-class offerings of their government-controlled systems.
Makes for a patriotic narrative. If only it were true.
If fact, there are serious problems with the AMS that don’t get a lot of notice. Most serious of all is the hundreds of thousands of Americans who die every year as a direct result of the “care” they receive. According to a well-documented body of research, “death by medicine” kills nearly 800,000 Americans a year, more than cancer or heart disease. And millions more suffer serious injuries:
This fully referenced report shows the number of people having in-hospital, adverse reactions to prescribed drugs to be 2.2 million per year. The number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral infections is 20 million per year. The number of unnecessary medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5 million per year. The number of people exposed to unnecessary hospitalization annually is 8.9 million per year.
Sounds bad but it gets worse:
As few as 5% and no more than 20% of iatrogenic acts [medically-caused injury and illness] are ever reported. This implies that if medical errors were completely and accurately reported, we would have an annual iatrogenic death toll much higher than 783,936.
We won’t be hearing about any of this from defenders of the AMS, even as they go on and on about the dangerous threats of “socialized medicine.” Few single-payer advocates will talk about it either, because who wants to ponder the possibility that your next visit to the doctor (however you pay for it) could make you deathly ill?
Nor can we expect much agitation for change on the part of medical profession itself. As Upton Sinclair once noted, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Way too many people are making way too much money from our current system to ever understand the need for radical rethinking and change.
