Preventing Political Malpractice
Health care costs are exploding. A robust public option would create competition that would lower costs, and increase access to life-saving medicine.
But wait! I have an idea! Let's eliminate the public option, and for good measure, take away the rights of the victims of medical malpractice by passing "tort reform." Even though, it um, doesn't work. You know, if by work, you mean lower health-care costs and do anything to help regular people afford health insurance.
But if you've been trained by "Permanent Majority" Rove, and your real purpose is to 1) Keep your corporate slop-providers happy 2) Punish a group that often gives donations to Democrats (lawyers) and 3) Pretend you actually care a whit about people who don't get Yacht Shoe Weekly, then bingo! You have your made up issue.
Thankfully, the American Association for Justice has begun a campaign to tell the truth about this issue, about the 98,000 people who lose their lives each year due to preventable medical error:
The American Association for Justice announced today it is launching what it called the first phase of a nationwide ad campaign "to educate lawmakers about the epidemic of preventable medical errors and how tort law changes won't lower costs or cover the uninsured."
The ads, running in Washington publications and on online news sites, say the estimated 98,000 deaths from preventable medical errors is "like two 737s crashing every day for a whole year."
But the ad concludes:"Would we blame the passengers or the airlines?"
Well, we know who Republicans and Blue Dogs would blame. The passengers. The pilots. The unions. Gay Marriage. Stem-cell research. But never the big corporations who make the planes.
Thankfully, we know better.
Disclosure: I'm damn spankin' proud to be working with the American Association for Justice to protect patients' rights.
Government of, by and for the corporations.
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Single Payer!
statusquObama, change you can only pretend in
To help defend , protect and support the citizens of this country..
They have failed in every phase of their job..
Emanuel has and still is making a corporate-legislation policy making machine of our democrat party.
Emanuel has been converting the democratic party to the center right for over 8 years.
The blue dogs would not have the control and making policies if not for Emanuel..
Just who is loading the committees with the corporate republican policy making personal..
None
Can't we now be living in the most wonderful place on Earth?
Answer: Because of greed and the love of money over human dignity.
"The US has an army of 90,000 soldiers in Afghanistan and is spending $100bn a year, but has still been unable to defeat 20,000-25,000 Taliban who receive no pay at all." - Patrick Cockburn
Especially, to allow tort actions by shareholders against companies for allowing people to waste premiums on health care.
"They pour syrup on shit and tell us it's hotcakes." Meteor Blades
whatever happens in the Obama administration, we can be sure that anything which does not benefit (R)ahmocrat campaign donors will be given the short shrift. and of the five bills pending, why is the Baucus bill, the true worst of the lot, being given the only serious mention? why are the other four bills not even cited for details or as possible points of reconciliation.
and why are the congressional bills being totally ignored. even maddow and Olberman are ignoring those bills. talk about media complicity with this charade.
worst of all, the most usurious, penalty-ridden bill is giving the tea-baggers plenty of credibility.
freaking ridiculous.
Some stuff you can't make up!
I'm giving you a standing ovation!
Are we going to select candidates to run against these republicans a.. kissing democrats before it is to late..
We now know they do not give a d... about the welfare and concerns of the working class in this country so they have to be voted out of office..
We have less than a year to select democrat candidates to replace the ones coming up for re-election..
None
The Baucas bill is indeed the quintessential example of snatching defeat from jaws of victory.
Everyone knows that projected savings in the bill are illusory. Even the "public option" bills have a tenuous claim to solvency. We lost the economists who worry about little details like (1) percentage of GDP spent on health care costs, (2) the inflation rate for health insurance premiums, and (3) the financial draining of the middle class. Even Bernanke tells Congress that individuals are paying too much of their income on health related costs, and everyone sits there scratching their head about the cause while health insurance companies bask in their 30% overhead costs.
So now the political stage is set for a train wreck:
1. Republicans and the Ron Paul crowd will go back to their constituents and be able to credibly claim that they fought for our individual rights not have to be forced to buy health insurance. See the Republican party cares about freedom and the little guy.
2. We are giving credibility to the crazy tea bagger lot who are yelling about government involvement in their Medicare (setting aside their inability to understand that Medicare is a government program). The 500 billion we are using to fund the program cannot come from "savings" in Medicare. It's like hearing McCain claim that he can balance the budget merely by cutting waste. No one believes it. Watching the Republicans posture as if their role is to save Medicare is truly surreal, but people will buy into the facade. See the Republicans care about seniors and Medicare.
3. The Democrats actually believe that the medical industrial complex will reward them for selling us out. The trick is that the corporations will give equal money to the other side because they don't care who wins the next election. Hell, the GOP will give it up for free on principle because they secretly despise the middle class.
So the Democrats get to claim "victory" with the Baucus bill, and the Republicans get to be the "principled party" that stood up for individual rights, fought for Medicare, and supported the free market at the same time.
I can hear Cantor's re-election stump speech now: "I fought against the corporate welfare of the bank bailout, I fought against the corporate welfare for the auto companies, I fought against the corporate welfare of the health care bill, I fought against the give aways to special interests in the stimulus bill, because I represent the people, not big corporations."
Lower taxes will fix everything!
and you can pay for all of it twice over.
Some stuff you can't make up!
if your a paying passenger, but if your a freeloading stowaway trying to get a free ride and you hide in the cargo hold and freeze to death, is it still the airlines problem....hmmmmm
I say go get them to the American Association of Justice. Trial lawyers are Personal Protection lawyers who help consumers fight back. Corporatists will stop at nothing to take away any recourse we as citizens have.
Cliff, I'm a big fan, but you are largely off base here. The most frustrating thing is the conflation of 98,000 preventable deaths and malpractice. They're different things. The "preventable deaths" are system-based problems which are most appropriately addressed by organizational quality programs -- Gawande's Checklists, for example, or simple measures like early removal of urinary catheters, hand-washing compliance and the like. We CAN save a lot of lives this way, and a I wrote at "Movin' Meat," I'm a big supporter of that.
But that is a different field of error than malpractice.
Med Mal reform, properly executed, has potential not to save money, but to more accurately and swiftly compensate victims of malpractice. I'm not talking about caps, which are blunt and probably unjust. I'm talking about a system which better ties causation to compensation. I manage a large EM group, and I can ell you how many cases where our care was less than ideal, but we won or scared off the plaintif, and I can tell you about cases where our case was awesome where we lost or wisely settled.
Tort reform won't save much money, either in direct costs or in defensive medicine. But it is needed to bring rationality beck to a broken system.
"due to preventable medical error"
As opposed to unpreventable medical error?
What is the working definition of both?
Does anybody really believe errors can be stopped (prevented?) We are all humans - is human error preventable?
"I know that there are people who do not love their fellow
man, and I hate people like that! " ~ Tom Lehrer (1928 - )
Most people fail to recognize that despite all the incredible scientific advances, medicine is still very much an art as well as a science, and often a diagnosis is a process of elimination. A man grasping his chest and gasping for air might be having a heart attack. Or may he's got pleurisy. Or maybe it's a horrible case of indigestion.
If someone presents with symptoms that could indicate a half dozen different ailments, and there's no test available to confirm which one is correct, it's possible the patient could be misdiagnosed. That misdiagnosis is a medical error, but it's not necessarily a preventable medical error.
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