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Allow me to play devil's advocate... Medical negligence is the third leading cause of death in the United States. We have an epidemic of "honest mistakes" like

Allow me to play devil's advocate... Medical negligence is the third leading cause of death in the United States. We have an epidemic of "honest mistakes" like scalpels left in patients after surgeries,[0] often leading to deaths, or amputations of the wrong limb[1] leading to enormous harms to the patient. Something as innocent as 'forgetting to wash your hands' has outsized consequences in this industry, forgiving 'honest mistakes' is not a safe standard. It's also not generally true that plaintiffs in tort cases receive exorbitant damages, this is a popular myth because there are a few outlandish examples. The most popular examples, such as the "Stella awards," are completely made up.[1][2] States that have capped medical malpractice have seen no difference in medical costs, and it has not been found to be a significant contribution to costs in the industry.[3] Meanwhile, capping costs hurts patients - some mistakes end up costing millions in additional medical costs throughout an injured patient's life, and most importantly for getting improved care over time, it lightens incentives for billion dollar hospitals to actually correct underlying procedures that make harms more likely. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retained_surgical_instruments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retained_surgical_instruments [1] http://www.hotcoffeethemovie.com/default.asp?pg=mcdonalds_case http://www.hotcoffeethemovie.com/default.asp?pg=mcdonalds_ca... [2] http://www.snopes.com/legal/lawsuits.asp http://www.snopes.com/legal/lawsuits.asp [3] http://www.decof.com/decof/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/five-myths-about-medical-negligence.pdf http://www.decof.com/decof/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/five-m... [4] More on handwashing as a challenge to health in hospitals: http://annals.org/aim/article/712481/compliance-handwashing-teaching-hospital http://annals.org/aim/article/712481/compliance-handwashing-...

DanBC 9y ago
> We have an epidemic of "honest mistakes" like scalpels left in patients after surgeries,[0] often leading to deaths, or amputations of the wrong limb[1] leading to enormous harms to the patient. I thought "wrong site surgery" was rare. https://www.ecri.org/components/HRCAlerts/Pages/HRCAlerts111815_Joint.aspx https://www.ecri.org/components/HRCAlerts/Pages/HRCAlerts111... > Wrong-site, wrong-patient, and wrong-procedure surgery continues to be the sentinel event most frequently reported to the Joint Commission, with 1,196 such events reported through September 30, 2015, according to recently updated statistics provided by the accreditor. The next most frequently reported events include unintended retention of a foreign object (1,072), delays in treatment (1,035), suicide (932), and operative or postoperative complications (904). That's way too many, but in 2009 there were 48 million inpatient surgical procedures carried out in the US. https://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-clinics/surgery-clinic/patient-resources/surgery-statistics.html https://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-clinics/surgery-clini... I don't think you can call 0.007% an "epidemic".
- brownbat 9y ago
  > I thought "wrong site surgery" was rare. It is, but that wasn't the entire sentence, nor really representative of the total harm from medical errors.
curun1r 9y ago
These sorts of incidents are terrible and we should do everything to avoid them going forward. But, given their prevalence, it would seem that the medical industry hasn't done a particularly good job of dealing with them. The current system, which is more interested in assigning blame and providing restitution, is the free market approach that believes that capital incentives are the only ones needed and seem, to me, to be a failure. If you contrast the way that the medical industry handles incidents with the way that the aviation industry handles incidents, you'll see that pilot incidents are handled through a process that is much more interested in preventing future problems than it is in assigning blame. This leads to less defensiveness and more cooperation in finding processes and equipment that prevent future problems. Also, if you want to make the case that malpractice settlements don't significantly contribute to the cost of health care, it's probably good to cite a source that isn't an association of trial lawyers. Among their failures in logic...arguing that insurance premiums are more tied to market performance than payouts completely disregards the fact that premiums wouldn't be necessary at all without the kind of payouts we currently have. There's an entire insurance industry making billions of dollars per year that is essentially unnecessary overhead that could be eliminated. And the trial lawyers themselves are making significant amounts of money off our broken health care system too. These types of overhead can be eliminated in a single-payer system. Malpractice can be handled by panels of doctors who's sole goals are to push out habitually negligent doctors and reduce the incidence of mistakes for the vast majority who are quality doctors. And, since single-payer covers all future medical costs, there's no need to compensate patients for future costs that result from malpractice. Such a system completely eliminates all the inefficiency of dealing with medical incidents using the judicial system.

DanBC 9y ago

> We have an epidemic of "honest mistakes" like scalpels left in patients after surgeries,[0] often leading to deaths, or amputations of the wrong limb[1] leading to enormous harms to the patient. I thought "wrong site surgery" was rare. https://www.ecri.org/components/HRCAlerts/Pages/HRCAlerts111815_Joint.aspx https://www.ecri.org/components/HRCAlerts/Pages/HRCAlerts111... > Wrong-site, wrong-patient, and wrong-procedure surgery continues to be the sentinel event most frequently reported to the Joint Commission, with 1,196 such events reported through September 30, 2015, according to recently updated statistics provided by the accreditor. The next most frequently reported events include unintended retention of a foreign object (1,072), delays in treatment (1,035), suicide (932), and operative or postoperative complications (904). That's way too many, but in 2009 there were 48 million inpatient surgical procedures carried out in the US. https://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-clinics/surgery-clinic/patient-resources/surgery-statistics.html https://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-clinics/surgery-clini... I don't think you can call 0.007% an "epidemic".

brownbat 9y ago
> I thought "wrong site surgery" was rare. It is, but that wasn't the entire sentence, nor really representative of the total harm from medical errors.

curun1r 9y ago

These sorts of incidents are terrible and we should do everything to avoid them going forward. But, given their prevalence, it would seem that the medical industry hasn't done a particularly good job of dealing with them. The current system, which is more interested in assigning blame and providing restitution, is the free market approach that believes that capital incentives are the only ones needed and seem, to me, to be a failure. If you contrast the way that the medical industry handles incidents with the way that the aviation industry handles incidents, you'll see that pilot incidents are handled through a process that is much more interested in preventing future problems than it is in assigning blame. This leads to less defensiveness and more cooperation in finding processes and equipment that prevent future problems. Also, if you want to make the case that malpractice settlements don't significantly contribute to the cost of health care, it's probably good to cite a source that isn't an association of trial lawyers. Among their failures in logic...arguing that insurance premiums are more tied to market performance than payouts completely disregards the fact that premiums wouldn't be necessary at all without the kind of payouts we currently have. There's an entire insurance industry making billions of dollars per year that is essentially unnecessary overhead that could be eliminated. And the trial lawyers themselves are making significant amounts of money off our broken health care system too. These types of overhead can be eliminated in a single-payer system. Malpractice can be handled by panels of doctors who's sole goals are to push out habitually negligent doctors and reduce the incidence of mistakes for the vast majority who are quality doctors. And, since single-payer covers all future medical costs, there's no need to compensate patients for future costs that result from malpractice. Such a system completely eliminates all the inefficiency of dealing with medical incidents using the judicial system.