Dear America,
I was listening to the news on the radio a couple of days ago while I was doing other things and there was a report that I heard just a phrase from. Deaths from avoidable medical errors--a euphemism for malpractice--have declined by 50,000 per year. I thought, if they have declined by that many, there can't be many left, so I went on the internet to look up the statistics. I checked several sources and they were all consistent in that they reported that such deaths still number--that is, even after being reduced by 50,000 per year--between 400,000 and 440,000 per year. To put that figure into a more graphic form, that means that every day something in excess of 1,100 people die because doctors, nurses and hospitals make mistakes that could be avoided...by better communication between doctors and nurses as they change shifts for example. Medical malpractice is rampant, and it is lethal, but if these are the figures for deaths, imagine what they must be for injuries of various kinds: amputating the wrong limb, prescribing medications that interact with already prescribed medicines in injurious ways, failing to diagnose problems that are obvious...as in the Texas ebola case for example. It's dangerous to get sick in this country, and these figures evoke this question; is the cure worse than the disease these days.
As I digested all this I reflected on the political summit held by President Obama with the Republicans when the Affordable Care Act was still under consideration. It was televised and among the issues that the Republicans wanted to deal with in any health care reform law was tort reform to reduce the $5 billion per year that malpractice litigation costs the medical profession by virtue of elevated malpractice insurance premiums. I have heard the statistics about these malpractice deaths before, but I was unaware of them then, and the only umbrage I took at the time was that $5 billion is not even a drop in the bucket when medical care costs us $3 trillion per year, so the Republican emphasis on this particular phenomenon was only a matter of typical partisan politicization of a non-issue based on the Republicans' affiliation with the people who have the most money, in this case, doctors. But when I heard the report on malpractice deaths earlier this week a different form of umbrage overtook me. It was more important to those Republicans on that panel to cut health care costs by a little over .001 percent by letting doctors off the hook for the carnage they were causing than it was to find a way to reduce the carnage. Once again, money was more important than people to the Republicans, which doesn't surprise me, but I wonder; would it surprise the people who used to vote Democrat when the Democrats controlled Congress, but now are voting Republican. And more importantly, if they did know, would they continue to trend toward the Republicans. Finally, why aren't the Democrats making an issue of all this, not just for political purposes, but because this is a moral issue, and it is life and death.
So here I am back on President Obama and his diffident approach to informing us Americans. Why isn't he talking about this problem as the Republicans continue to assail the first good thing the government has done for us with regard to our healthcare system, that is "Obamacare," since Medicare and Medicaid fifty or more years ago? Why aren't my senators and congressmen talking about it here in Connecticut? Why aren't your senators and congressmen doing so? More than once every two years, the medical profession kills more people than died in the Civil War. Each year they kill 8 times the number of Americans that died in the Vietnam war. Medical malpractice is the third leading cause of death in this country behind only heart disease and cancer, and it is about twelve times more lethal than motor vehicle crashes. Why is the House Oversight Committee still investigating the murders in Benghazi two years ago even though two congressional committees have published reports that prove there is no scandal to uncover while it does nothing to investigate the failure of our government to act on curtailing medical malpractice murder. Of course, these are all rhetorical questions because we all know the answer...the single answer...to all those questions: politics. But the most important question of all isn't why our politicians do or don't do anything. The real question is, if the Republicans are on the wrong side of so much of this misdirected energy, why do they continue to get elected and reelected. In a nation that prides itself on its capacity to teach the rest of the world how to govern democratically, why aren't we doing a better job--and when I say we I mean you and I--of winnowing out the idiots, shallow opportunists and fortune hunters from our political system by using our votes with just a little bit of discretion? What are we thinking? Are we thinking at all?
Of course, I have asked all these questions in different contexts when commenting on the last three elections, all of which surprised me in that Republican obduracy on the subject of everything that constrains moneyed interests, even when they act to the detriment of the American people, seems so overt and well publicized. Still, this medical malpractice plague seems different both quantitatively and qualitatively to the point that everything else our government doesn't do for us seems nothing more significant than a momentary glint on a distant horizon. Close to half a million of us are dieing every year of a preventable cause, but our politicians seem not to notice. Maybe we shouldn't vote for any of them, and just let the country run as best it can without them. For about 440, 000 of us a year, it couldn't make things any worse.
Your friend,
Mike
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