Battling Healthcare

I’ve owned my own business for many years. Before I began my work in patient advocacy and empowerment, I was a marketer, and advised dozens of businesses of all sizes (from individual professional services like lawyers and therapists to large corporations like GE and Kodak.) I get business, I understand development of income streams and I fully realize that profitability is always the goal among these businesses.

But I also know that profitability and business models are at the very heart at what is WRONG with healthcare. No matter what the problem with the system, its roots are grounded in the need to make money by someone.

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Dr. Betsy McCaughey thinks so. And states her case quite well in her testimony before the Congress of the United States.

Who’s Betsy McCaughey? Dr. Betsy McCaughey is the founder, president, CEO, chief honcho of RID: Reduce Hospital Deaths. She founded her organization in 2004 in reasponse to the alarming growth in the deaths of Americans due to hospital acquired infections.

She is a health policy expert, having concentrated on health legislation during her four years as Lt. Governor of New York State during the Pataki years. And how all she wants to do is save lives by making hospitals accountable for preventing the spread of infections which kill their patients.

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If you follow the news at all, you’ve heard of MRSA, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus. It’s the superbug infection that mostly attacks people with compromised immune systems — the elderly, anyone with an autoimmune disease, someone who has just had surgery or has any form of open wound. The majority of MRSA is contracted in hospitals. In the past year or so, others have acquired MRSA and other superbugs in the community.

As a reminder, what makes a superbug is the bacteria’s ability to overcome any medicine developed to kill it. Methicillin was developed to kill difficult, hospital acquired strains of bacteria, and it was saving lives…. until the bugs it was killing figured out how to be stronger than the methicillin.

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… you probably think they don’t affect you, because you only pick up your prescriptions at the local pharmacy, or get samples from your doctor….

But you would be wrong. Counterfeit drugs may be found in your own medicine cabinet — and you have no way of knowing they are counterfeit.

Surprised? I was too — and because I too often have to be so cynical in my work — I never should have been so surprised. Why? Because so much of healthcare is about money. And counterfeiting is all about money — making it for the perpetrators, and saving it for those who have to pay, whether that’s a pharmacy or a health insurer. And who’s money and lives is it costing? Ours, because we are the patients.

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If you are among the people who read my blogs on a regular basis, then you already know how dangerous healthcare can be. Sad, because healthcare is intended to IMPROVE lives, certainly not hurt them.

In fact, healthcare can be dangerous, sometimes randomly through mistakes and missteps. It can be dangerous for what is ignored or through mere laziness. Other times it’s dangerous because of access questions — if you don’t have the right insurance, or if you are lacking insurance, you don’t have the same options as others.

I do not believe any provider or payer ever sets out to make it intentionally dangerous, but then, the road to heaven, etc etc….

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It was revealed this week in documents released by Merck over the Vioxx debacle that we were all scammed — patients, doctors, stockholders and legitimate drug researchers.

If you aren’t familiar with the Merck and Vioxx scandal, let me bring you up to date.

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The US Department of Health and Human Services / Department of Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) provides a website called Hospital Compare that allows potential patients to size up a hospital before they are admitted. Need to know how many heart surgeries are successful at your local hospital? Need to know its mortality rate? The information can be found at www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov.

And now, a new addition to the website will make this website even more valuable to those of us who do our due diligence. I love this!

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