MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS

I have never considered myself part of the mainstream media, although I have been accused many times of being a gatekeeper for certain interests. Each time this accusation is levied against me, I actually laugh because there is really no reason for me to protect some agenda – if the accusation is made, I realize those who make it have an axe to grind against some race or religious group.

They get so caught up in some of the old attitudes and yet they want to be validated as coming up with some new revelation, when it is the same worn out conspiracy theory, or a left against right argument that clouds the real conspiracy that is buried in minutiae.

The media today focuses on scandals, the negatives and news stories that generate ratings and prop up agendas that lack any and all logic. Often, the media tries to insert itself into relevance by pushing too hard on stories that really aren’t stories at all. They make everything a political issue and they are succeeding.

I have avoided a lot of the spun stories and have stopped and contemplated the maneuvers of the political glitterati. Usually, the issues they discuss are outdated and really not all that interesting.

For example, the rebranding of Obamacare has turned into some empty manipulation. It has become a talking point on who has the better plan and why plans have failed, and who is to blame for the failure of government to agree on what is good for America’s health.

America’s health is failing, and people are dying by the numbers.

People who have been sick don’t even open their medical bills anymore because they know that owing 6 figures for drugs, surgeries, and other treatments will lead to bankruptcy.

Many patients don’t even do what they have to for preventive care anymore because they can’t afford it and yet they demand to be magically returned to health anyway.

Not only that, but there are people every day who have to deal with the perverse incentives, the limited procedures, the endlessly negative unintended consequences of overstaying your welcome at the hospital.

The scams are endless, the skims are endless, the fraud is endless, the waste is endless, the fortunes expended to limit “winner take all” liability claims are endless, the paperwork churn is endless, and, the perverse incentives and negative unintended consequences are endless.

Everyone knows the system is unsustainable, perverse and insane, but they are powerless to change it within the system as it is. The usual sort of political horse hockey that passes for “reform” or even “repeal” is just a political football that is being passed around, fumbled and nowhere near the end zone.

We are facing the failing financial future of a system with runaway costs, a rapidly aging populace and profiteering pharmaceutical cartels focused on maintaining their rackets regardless of the cost to the nation or the health of its people.

Last September, I visited my father in the hospital. He was admitted last August because he had a wound on his heal. He apparently had stepped on something and being diabetic he really didn’t feel anything until he realized it was horribly infected and that the infection had gone to the bone.

The wound was operable, but due to by father’s age they said the healing would take more time and that to prevent further infection he would have to take some very powerful antibiotics.

The operation was a success. His antibiotic treatment however left him susceptible to other infections. He developed a case of Clostridium difficile or C. Diff. In 2013, the CDC published a report outlining the top 18 drug-resistant threats to the United States. These threats were categorized based on level of concern: urgent, serious, and concerning.

C. Diff was considered an urgent health concern.

A 2015 CDC study found that C. Difficile caused almost half a million infections among patients in the United States in a single year. An estimated 15,000 deaths are directly attributable to C. Difficile infections, making it a substantial cause of infectious disease death in the United States.

At the time, I did not know how serious this really was, only that in order to visit my father in the hospital, we had to wear masks and surgical drapes.

After a few weeks, my sister said that he was improving, a week later my father was told that he needed a bi pap to breath as he also was suffering from pulmonary edema. My father realized that his time was about to end and so we all called him and said goodbye. Twenty minutes after my call, my father passed away.

With the funeral and the burial long since passed, during the grieving period I never really stopped to think about hoe my father became another statistic. My father became one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals. One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now think about this — let us suppose that a well-known hamburger chain served uncooked hamburger tainted with e-coli bacteria. Let us also hypothetically say that 1000 people that ate the tainted burger died from eating the uncooked meat.

The Board of Health would shut down the business. Track down the offending supplier, and there would be wrongful death lawsuits piling up to the ceiling.

This doesn’t happen with our health care facilities, nor is it of grave concern in the so-called repeals and reforms of health care paddy caked about by the political elite.

Those 100,000 deaths are not just the only problem that is overlooked. A Wall Street Journal story suggested that blood clots following surgery or illness, the leading cause of preventable hospital deaths in the U.S., may kill nearly 200,000 patients per year.

How is it that Americans learn to accept hundreds of thousands of deaths from minor medical mistakes as inevitability?

I am sure that the political pundits in their so called attempts at reform have overlooked the importance of facility standards with regards to the wellness and recovery of a patient.

The persistence of bad industry practices, from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause.

We pay six figures for what?

The rest of the financial bleeding goes to the undertaker — that is your conspiracy of negligence in health care repeals and reforms.

It’s a paradox – people go into the hospital to get well, yet, every year in the U.S., over 2 million of them go into hospitals and get sick with a hospital-acquired infection.

It is not all that surprising actually when you consider that many people in hospitals have communicable diseases.

It’s been estimated that patients who contract an infection in the hospital stay an average of 20.6 days compared with 4.5 days for other patients, and their hospital stays cost six times more. The estimate for society as a whole range from $5 to $30.5 billion every year.

If these numbers surprise you, you’re not alone. The topic has gotten sporadic exposure in the press, but since many states don’t require hospitals to tally and report infections, they’re just not high profile enough to stay on our radar.

Healthcare professionals don’t really have a handle on whether hospital-acquired infections are on the rise or are being conquered. In a 2007 report, the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) cited declines in rates of central line associated bloodstream infections and surgical site infections observed among certain hospitals from about 1992 to 2004 as a positive trend.

However, a number of factors point to a potential for the problem to worsen before it gets better. Numbers have been notoriously underreported, and as data gathering and submission improves for more hospitals, the numbers will rise. As microbes develop new survival tactics to resist drug treatments, they are becoming more virulent.

Since 2009, Medicare, US government’s health insurance program for elderly and disabled Americans, will not cover the costs of “preventable” conditions, mistakes and infections resulting from a hospital stay.

So for instance, if you are on Medicare and you pick up a hospital acquired infection while you are being treated for something that is covered by Medicare, the extra cost of treating the hospital acquired infection will no longer be paid for by Medicare. Instead, the bill will be picked up by the hospital itself since the rules don’t allow the hospital to charge it to you.

What about those without Medicare?

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality showed that hospitals benefit financially when patients’ hospital stays are complicated by preventable infections.

The cost to care for any ICU patient who develops an avoidable central-line-associated bloodstream infection is nearly three times what it would be for a similar patient without such an infection, the researchers found. These patients spend an average of 23 extra days in the hospital, and hospitals receive eight times as much margin per patient, they reported.

For the study, researchers reviewed hospital records at Queens Medical Center in Honolulu. The hospital participated in the state-wide Comprehensive Unit Based Safety (CUSP) program to reduce central line infections from 2009 through 2011. The program determined costs, payment, and profit margin for 16 HAI patients and compared them with 64 ICU patients who did not have line infections. For treating an infected patient, the hospital’s average margin per patient was $54,906, but for treating a similar but uninfected patient, the hospital lost $6,506.

For 10 government-insured ICU patients with CLABSIs, the mean payment to the hospital was $154,832, and for 39 ICU patients who did not have a CLABSI, the mean payment was $58,327, for a difference of $96,594.

For five commercially insured ICU patients who had a CLABSI, the mean hospital payment was $495,000, and for 23 ICU patients who did not have a CLABSI, it was $100,000, a difference of $395,000.

The diagnosis-related group (DRG) payment system that most health insurers use to pay hospitals provides a perverse incentive by paying more for more complicated care.

DRGs pay by the episode, which should provide an incentive for hospitals to keep costs low, but hospitals can receive more for complex care under provisions for outliers. With outlier payments, a hospital is paid a percentage of charges, meaning the more it charges, the more it receives.

And for outliers, private insurers pay more than government insurers, even when the triggering event is preventable.

The conspiracy in health care is that there is a bit of sickening negligence and greed which prevails in the case of hospital acquired infections.

While we are told that the Affordable Health Care Act insurance was reasonably good for prescriptions and routine care, but when it comes to serious illness, and illnesses caused by the hospital, the end result will kill you; that of course, if it doesn’t physically put you in grave.

https://soundcloud.com/groundzeromedia/death-and-politics-the-real-health-care-conspiracy-w-dr-joel-wallach-march-28-2017

Written by Ron Patton