Five frightening facts about the American health care system

General Director of a non-profit medical organization Kaiser Permanente Robert Pearl has released a book about the problems of the US health care system called “Mistreated: Why We’re Usually Wrong"(" Why do we think that we get good medical care, and why we usually make mistakes ").

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In this book, he talked about the most frightening facts in American medicine, the publication New York Post selected five of the brightest of them.

Medical errors are the third most common cause of death in the United States, which accounts for almost 10% of all deaths in America

A 1999 study found that “98 people die in hospitals every year due to medical errors.” But that figure rises to about 200 each year when you include "doctors who cannot communicate effectively with their colleagues, doctors and nurses who give patients the wrong medications, and doctors whose actions have led to the spread of infections in hospitals."

The leading cause of death for patients in US hospitals is not heart attack or stroke, but infection, and one reason is that “doctors, nurses and other hospital staff do not wash their hands when they go from one room to another.” Pearl writes that one bacterium Clostridium difficile 14 causes thousands of deaths per year, which makes decontamination of hands, rooms and hospital surfaces an absolute necessity, but in 30% of cases, doctors do not.

50% of American doctors use paper rather than electronic documents to enter patient data, which could cost some of their clients their lives

The average American visits various doctors during the life of 19. Therefore, the use of paper cards of patients instead of electronic, as half the doctors in the United States do, leads to incomplete information about the patient with the new doctor that he can contact. The new doctor does not know about your allergies and tests, if he does not have access to the papers of the previous doctor who treated you. Because of this, people can often undergo procedures that are dangerous for them or, on the contrary, receive no important vaccination, because the doctor will decide what the previous doctor should have done.

Healthcare workers earn more when they make mistakes because they get paid again to solve a new problem

Health workers receive payment from insurance companies on the basis of payment for the service, and not the benefits of this service. In other words, doctors are paid for the amount of care they provide, and not for its quality.

Therefore, if an infected patient develops an infection, the surgeon will receive more money, because he will also need to treat the infection more than the doctor who will perform the operation without incurring the infection.

A stronger focus on disease prevention can save up to 200 thousands of lives a year in the US

In the US, there is a very low level of prevention of diseases, because doctors do not insist on this.

If healthcare workers in the United States made prevention a priority, it would reduce the risk of hypertension, stroke and heart attacks on 10-30% across the country, which on average would save 200 lives of thousands of Americans who die of heart attacks and strokes. But doctors are not interested in prevention, because the treatment of diseases is more profitable for them.

The drug addiction crisis in the United States is the result of targeted action by pharmaceutical companies

Every year, 40 thousand people in the United States die from drug overdoses. 60% of these deaths occur from overdoses of drugs for which the patient had a prescription from a doctor. The number of drug deaths is constantly rising - between 1990 and 2012, the proportion of patients who died from a drug overdose increased by more than 100%.

Pearl notes that "this did not happen by accident" and was "the result of a deliberate attempt by some drug manufacturers to change the minds of doctors in favor of prescribing more dangerous drugs."

In the 1960s, doctors became cautious about prescribing opiates after the rates of addiction increased. As a result, by the beginning of 1990-s, narcotic drugs were prescribed to patients only in case of emergency.

This situation really needed to be corrected, but some pharmaceutical companies took up the promotion of their interests extremely aggressively, declaring that their drugs do not cause dependence and do not bear any danger to patients.

Today, when opiate abuse kills a person a day in the US 91, it became clear that the promises of pharmaceutical companies turned out to be false.

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