Don't get sick, don't go to the hospital

So I go to cover this healthcare project today and they put out some numbers I thought I would share. I was pretty much horrified.
In the United State, 37 million people will get admitted to the hospital every year, while there, 15 million of them will get injured, sick or hurt from something done to them at the hospital.
By percentage it works out to be about 40 percent of everyone going into the hospital gets worse when they get there, which makes for a helluva batting average.
The medical term for it is "incidents of harm." The cause might have been from an infection, or the wrong pill, or something else more exotic like amputating the wrong limb, but all 15 million are preventable, if the hospital tries hard enough.
All 15 million.
So some very concerned people got together and thought that was bad. So the 100,000 Lives campaign was started. The goal was to prevent 100,000 of those incidents. It worked, some 125,000 people are alive today as a result.
Simple things like telling doctors not to wear a tie on rounds. The ties come into contact with a sick patient, then when the doc moves on to another room, the tie comes into contact with another patient, who isn't sick, but now has a staph infection.
Believe it or not, some hospitals fought the changes, despite the fact that everything was provided for free. Gotta love charitable grants.
Now the campaign is more ambitious and have bumped the number up to 5 Million.
And again some hospitals and doctors are fighting it. This should be a national scandal, but it isn't.
I can't get my puny brain wrapped around it. Like one of the things is to have the providers - doctors, nurses, etc - to clean their hands before and after they touch a patient. The campaign provides the dispensers at no cost to any hospital wanting to sign up and ask that they be installed near the patient's bed. But some places are like, nope. And I'm like, what the fuck!
I don't know how I'm going to write it up yet but I got me a feeling this is one of those stories that will get read by legal counsel before it goes to print.
Thanks for letting me vent.

j

 

And that doesn't even begin to tough on the ass-raping insurance companies give you over a trip to the hospital.

EDIT: Jay, it might be worth asking who pays for care when doctors/hospitals mess up. Do insurance companies fight that? Do hospitals accept any financial responsibility for their mistakes?

 

Or the number of uninsured or underinsured Americans, which is close to 45 million.

The horror stories I've learned since moving into this industry are making me consider a Kevorkian end when I finally get old enough.

 

It pretty much varies from case to case.
On some things, the insurance company pays. That's why Blue Cross is the single-largest supporter of the campaign. Hospitals some time waive the bill, and on others, that is why doctors carry malpractice insurance.
I wouldn't go nor would I send a family member to a hospital that didn't participate in the program.