Did the Surgeon Leave His Scissors in Your Belly? The Feds Will Help Keep It Under Wraps.

Hospital Compare, a federal website
aimed at helping patients make more informed choices about where to
seek treatment, no longer reports on catastrophic medical errors at
the facilities it monitors.

So what sorts of mistakes qualify as “hospital acquired
conditions,” which were wiped from the consumer website last
summer, and as of this month also disappeared from the data sets
used by researchers? The list includes cases of surgeons leaving
sponges in their patient’s abdomens, air embolisms (deadly gas
bubbles in the blood stream), and transfusions with the wrong blood
type. In agreeing to conceal the information, the Obama
administration is bending to the will of the American Hospital
Association, the industry’s lobbying arm.

David Goldhill, author of the terrific 2013 book
Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father–and
How We Can Fix It, recently
wrote about the data cover up for Time:

Is it somehow unfair that the public knows that one airline –
Malaysia Air – flew two of the planes in our most recent commercial
aviation tragedies? After all, the exact cause of either
catastrophe isn’t yet known, and it’s not clear that Malaysia Air
was at fault in either. The airline flies roughly 91,000
flights per year safely; no Malaysian Air flight had been involved
in a fatal accident since 1995. Is it really fair to name the
airline?

Of course. And yet,

In health care, we still believe that hospitals can kill
patients as a result of errors and retain rights to
confidentiality. That may help explain why the airline industry
grows safer every year, and estimates of deaths from medical errors
are now so high they would rank as the third-leading cause of death
in America behind only cancer and heart disease.

Read the whole thing.

Give
Hospital Compare a whirl. I found the site to be utterly
useless in evaluating whether I’d want to be treated at a
particular hospital, which isn’t much of a surprise given that the
federal agency in charge of the
site was also responsible for HealthCare.gov.

Certainly the government shouldn’t be in the hospital review
business, but as David Goldhill pointed out in a recent Reason TV interview
conducted by Kmele Foster, the underlying cause of hospital
errors is our third-party payer system—patients don’t act like
discerning consumers because they’re not directly on the hook for
the cost of their own care.

Watch the interview: