Must Read article from the Atlantic: How American Health Care Killed My Father (September 2009)

Sep 5, 2009

David Goldhill’s piece highlights a personal journey of disbelief around how health care and hospitals work today in his essay, How American Health Care Killed My Father – The Atlantic (September 2009) .

For those who haven’t seen it, its a terrific read, and highlighted by David Brooks as the first thing he would ask President Obama to do in preparation for his health care speech. An excerpt below:

Hospitals implementing Pronovost’s checklist had enjoyed almost instantaneous success, reducing hospital-infection rates by two-thirds within the first three months of its adoption. But many physicians rejected the checklist as an unnecessary and belittling bureaucratic intrusion, and many hospital executives were reluctant to push it on them. The story chronicled Pronovost’s travels around the country as he struggled to persuade hospitals to embrace his reform.

It was a heroic story, but to me, it was also deeply unsettling. How was it possible that Pronovost needed to beg hospitals to adopt an essentially cost-free idea that saved so many lives? Here’s an industry that loudly protests the high cost of liability insurance and the injustice of our tort system and yet needs extensive lobbying to embrace a simple technique to save up to 100,000 people.

And what about us—the patients? How does a nation that might close down a business for a single illness from a suspicious hamburger tolerate the carnage inflicted by our hospitals?

While those of us in health take this current state for granted, it is a reminder of how morally corrupt the incentives are that promote physician convenience over patient outcomes, that promote aloof and unaccountable treatment approaches, and that take little interest in examining failures to constantly improve results.

I’m reinvigorated as I’m refocused on improving health, not engaged in all the insurance goobledygook going around in the “health care reform debate”.