195,000 Deaths Due to Hospital Error

This is stunning:

"As many as 195,000 people a year could be dying in U.S. hospitals because of easily prevented errors, a company said on Tuesday in an estimate that doubles previous figures."

I have to believe that a large component of this is that very few people in this country actually directly contract for their medical services. Most healthcare is paid for by government or insurance, which is in turn paid for in large part by employers. Most people think this is a good and necessary thing, but few consider the unintended consequences of this approach. Few are willing even to honestly access, acknowledge, and properly weigh these costs against the presumed benefits of 3rd payer system. But it does have costs, and IMO those costs outweigh the benefits on the whole. Milton Friedman made the case for why in this interview. Here's an excerpt:

But the government has introduced the major complication. The major complication is caused by third party payments. The fact that you have more complexity in medicine is a good thing. During the whole of the past 100 years, life expectancy has been going up. It was going up before there were these government programs, it's been going up since. But life expectancy actually went up faster before these programs were introduced than since.

In 1946, just after World War 2, total medical expenditures was about 5% of national income. Today, it's 17%. And life expectancy increased far more rapidly in the 50 years before World War 2 than it is increasing today. I believe that the progress and the quality of medical care has increased independent of the amount we spend on it through government. The relationship between your father and the doctor he paid at the door could work well in our time. It doesn't work well when your father doesn't pay the doctor directly but calls in a third party, and some third party has to judge whether that medical procedure is necessary. That's what causes the complication.

There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you're doing, and you try to get the most for your money.

Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I'm not so careful about the content of the present, but I'm very careful about the cost.

Then, I can spend somebody else's money on myself. And if I spend somebody else's money on myself, then I'm sure going to have a good lunch!

Finally, I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get. And that's government. And that's close to 40% of our national income.

What hospital goes out of business for killing its patients? There needs to be a competitive market in healthcare services in which the END CONSUMER, not their proxies, are making the choice. We like to complain that the insurance companies don't make the right decisions on our behalf, and many are quick to demonize them. But it is a delusion that even if medical insurance companies were run by saints and angels that they could even muster the bureaucratic talents to make more appropriate decisions for people on their behalf more often than people could make them for themselves. The third party payer system in this country, indoctrinated by government, will inevitably, IMO, get worse results than if the end consumers, who might take greater note of which hospitals are the worst at killing people and use their power of the purse to go elsewhere, made those decisions on their own behalf.