Newsletter
Issue 2
Healthcare Crisis Facts
• Preventable medical errors add $500 billion annually to health care costs - 30 percent of all costs. According to Forbes Magazine "Shoddy quality control plagues American medicine, killing at least a hundred thousand people every year and running up an estimated $500 billion a year in avoidable medical costs, or 30% of all health care spending." [Forbes, 6/20/05]
• Hospital acquired infections contribute to almost 1,800 deaths and add billions to health care costs annually in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Health Care Containment Council (PHC4) released a study that reported 11,668 confirmed hospital-acquired infections in 2004, infections occurred associated with 1,793 deaths, and an estimated 205,000 extra hospital days and $2 billion in additional hospital charges. The total number of infections and cost are undoubtedly higher as 16 Pennsylvania hospitals reported they had not a single infection last year and several other large hospitals submitted invalid infection data. [PHC4 release, 7/13/05]
• The hold up to reducing these errors? Doctors themselves. According to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), it is the medical community itself that stands in the way of improved care. Reporting that the number of preventable deaths had not declined since the original 1999 report, JAMA wrote that the barriers to improving patient safety are no longer technical but rather lie in "beliefs, intentions, cultures, and choices" of the medical community. [May 2005]
• Malpractice costs are just 2% of all health care spending. According to the federal government’s non-partisan General Accounting Office, malpractice costs - all costs, including settlements and judgments, defense costs, the cost of the expert witnesses, etc. - are just two percent of all health care costs. [Wall Street Journal, 11/30/04]
• The nation’s largest medical malpractice insurance company has admitted that caps will not lower rates physicians pay. In a filing in support of their request for a 19% rate hike in Texas - a filing made AFTER the state passed caps - GE Medical Protective, the country’s largest malpractice insurer, stated, "Non-economic damages are a small percentage of total losses paid. Capping non-economic damages will show loss savings of 1.0%." [MedPro filing, 10/30/03]