How American Health Care Killed My Father

Daniel Goldhill, a business executive, wrote an essay about how his father was killed by a hospital-borne infection in the intensive-care unit of a well-regarded nonprofit hospital in NYC. Admitted as a pneumonia patient, he acquired sepsis and died five weeks later, becoming one of the 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused by hospital-borne infections each year.
According to the author, about a week after his father’s passing, he came across an article in the New Yorker about a procedure developed by Peter Pronovost who offered a checklist of ICU protocols regarding hand washing and other basic sterilization procedures to reduce the incidence of fatal hospital-borne infections. Hospitals that have introduced Pronovost’s plan have seen a reduction of infections by 2/3rds. However, many physicians have rejected the plan as demeaning and un-necessary.
The author was at a loss to understand how Pronovost has had to literally beg hospitals to implement his simple cost-free procedures; especially since the health industry loudly protests the high cost of liability insurance and the injustice of the tort system.
The author has expressed amazement that our government will shut down a whole industry for a single illness from a suspicious hamburger while tolerating the wholesale death of hospital patients from infections. He cited a Wall Street Journal article claiming 200,000 patients die in hospitals from blood clots after surgery or illness each year, calling it the leading cause of preventable hospital deaths.
After doing as much research as possible, this grief stricken son concluded that the hospital industry has missed out on the revolution in quality control and customer service that has swept all other consumer-facing industries in the past two generations. He wondered why the health care industry continues to get away with poor customer services, unaffordable prices, and uneven results –a reason his father and so many more are unnecessarily killed from preventable deaths in hospitals.
After examining the business end of the health care system, he believes that the incentives used by the industry emphasizes health care over any other aspects of health and well being, which emphasizes treatment over prevention, that disguises true costs, that favors complexity and discourages transparent competition based on price or quality. The result, he contends, is a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing, removing consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value.
For these reasons, our health care system has produced the national dilemma of runaway costs and poorly covered millions and, sadly, the health industry believes that these conditions don’t need to be solved, but rather are papered over, worked around and patched up. He goes on to conclude that the current health care reform effort in Congress essentially cements in place the current system—insurance-based, employment centered, administratively complex health care.
He recommended that the foundation of our health system must be fixed, which is, largely problems of incentives. To accomplish this, health care must ne subject to the same forces that have boosted efficiency and value throughout the economy with the end result that the consumer becomes the ultimate guarantor of good service, reasonable prices, and sensible trade-offs between health care spending and spending on all other good things money can buy. We need to step back and examine our basic assumptions about health care—what it actually is, how it’s financed, its accountability to patients, and finally, its relationship to the eternal laws of supply and demand, all of which are considerations outside the emerging political consensus about reform.
My personal reaction to the above information is primarily one of disbelief. The article was featured in the Atlantic, a well-known international magazine that has enjoyed an impeccable reputation. Surely, someone has brought this matter to the attention of the proper authorities, especially to those currently engaged in the reform of our national health care system at Congress. But, alas, it is apparent that the health industry has imposed its will, once again, on the lawmakers with generous financial aid to their reelection funds. Senator Baucus, a former president of an insurance company, has put his stamp of approval on the bill with his position as Chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee. Let us hope his intentions are in the interest of the consumers of health care and not insurance companies.
It is strange that when a child gets sick from a hamburger or canned tuna the government starts shouting for all to hear, “Here I am to save you from further harm. I’m your ever vigilant protector.” But, an alarm about unsafe practices in our hospitals is met with total silence from that same self-proclaimed protector, our government. Strange indeed!