Interesting article. I found a lot of this while following my mother in her cancer treatment. The doctors told us very little and seemed insulted when we dug for more information. We've focused on the insurance company in this round of health care reform, but that only addresses how we pay for our care. We also need to look at the quality of that care and it's delivery.
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What really ails American heath care Hubris, at all levels, drags the system down. And no law can fix it.
In a 2008 survey by the Harvard University School of Public Health and Harris Interactive, 55 percent of US respondents said patients in America received better care than those in Canada, Great Britain, and France. Perhaps this is why Americans have been so ambivalent about reform. But the facts suggest we do not have better care than other countries; not even close. In 2007, a report by the private foundation the Commonwealth Fund compared the United States with Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and Great Britain and found our system ranks last or next to last in the categories of quality, access, and efficiency.
In 1999, the nonprofit Institute of Medicine issued a seminal report estimating that as many as 98,000 Americans were dying in hospitals each year as a result of preventable errors. That was supposed to be a wake-up call. But apparently we are still groggy. A recent study published in the journal Health Affairs found that 10 years later there was only modest improvement. When Toyota makes mistakes that possibly result in dozens of deaths, the country is outraged. When hospitals make mistakes that result in some 100,000 deaths per year, we shrug.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2010/05/30/what_really_ails_american_health_care/
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