Our president said that 100,000 people unnecessarily die each year because of medical errors in hospitals.
Leave aside the fact that this statistic has been debunked (”some of the researchers who conducted the original studies used in the IOM report re-evaluated their data in 2002 and reported that had they used a different calculation method, the number of estimated deaths would have been less than 10 percent of the original”).
Would you have repeated that number without doing some fact checking? Would a reasonable person, off the top of his head, believe that preventable medical errors in hospitals (this wouldn’t include preventable medical errors outside hospitals [think: nursing homes], or unpreventable medical errors – like doctors guessing wrong, or committing unpreventable human error) are the 6th leading cause of death, nearly on a par with “accidents”? Accounting for more than 1 out of 25 deaths?
I don’t think so. That number is, on its face, not credible. It’s unfortunate that our president feels it necessary to fear-monger with inflated numbers to get his way. But I’m not sure we should expect any different from this president.
A new rule: Any statistic used by this administration in hawking its policies should be presumed invalid until confirmed.
(H/T)
Posted by Apollo in CHANGE!, Health Care