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The Medicare Administrator tells us how wonderful Obamacare is going to be for the lowering of costs of practicing medicine:

The Partnership for Patients is investing up to $1 billion to help health-care professionals learn about and implement proven methods for improving patient safety. Reducing medical injuries and complications for patients will save lives and prevent suffering; it’s also a smart way to reduce costs. The Partnership for Patients will prevent millions of unnecessary medical injuries and tens of thousands of deaths, while reducing Medicare costs by $50 billion over the next decade.

So, we require the government to help out doctors figure out ways to stop killing and maiming people? I think someone ought to ask why that situation exists in the first place. It must clearly be because in medicine and medical training, anyone can practice in a fly-by-night manner right now, and that patients and doctors merely commodify the relationship which ought not be commodified. Right?

Hey, and someone keep tabs on all of these cost savings. $5 billion a year. Who wants to bet me that they never materialize?

4 Responses to “Just What Do They Do In Med School?”

  1. Cville says:

    Whatever is spent, which is sure to be an increase over today, is $5 billion less than what it would have been without these new practices. It’s just your garden variety, unverifiable spending claim.

  2. Harry says:

    This is the way lawyers think about medicine, showing faux alarm about medical errors, a la our last Governor, Ed Rendell, or the former head of the FDA, Larry Kessler. The progressive solution is to protect us from quacks and snake-oil salesmen selling inefficaceous medicine not subject to a double-blind trial. Trials are right up their alley.

    Hey, they protected us from robber barons, right?

  3. Harry says:

    I also liked the part about “investing $1 billion.” Wasting is the operative word. As you imply, no one will calculate the return. Nobody cares, nor does anybody in government understand what the word investment means, or what return on investment means, unless it a tax object. Return, as in tax return filed by the guy behind the tree, from whom we will disgorge property.

  4. John says:

    “That situation” does not exist. American life expectancies are ever increasing. In spite of or because of current medical practice? The famous Institute of Medicine study, “To Err is Human”, is flawed (read it or about it-it is an extrapolation of two studies).

    There is one sure way to decrease medical injuries and complications: stop providing care. Zero iatrogenic morbidity/mortality. Very cost effective, as well. Just don’t get sick!

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