Medical error ranks as the country’s eighth leading cause of death, more deadly than breast cancer or highway accidents.
Between 44,000 and 98,000 patients die every year in of hospital acquired infections or as the consequence of a mistaken diagnosis or a bungled operation.
Various cut/paste snippets of Lawrence Latham’s The God in the Machine:
American hospitals and doctors are paid for the amount of care they produce, not for its effectiveness or its quality—their first care is for the treatment of paper.
It isn’t that the country lacks for competent and caring doctors, but too many of them have been infected with the virus of the profit motive, overburdened with the ceremonial filling out of forms…
They discuss the positioning of decimal points, the relative value of this or that budget estimate… the cash flows to be drawn… the health of profit margins… preserving the life of stock prices…
The “waste” and “inefficiency” in the system is its bone and marrow.
The annual tithe collected by the medical-industrial complex: The corpses in waiting serve as sacrificial offerings placed on the altars of the god in the ATM.