At the same time, some major pharmaceutical companies have essentially stopped development of new antibiotics for a variety of confounding reasons: finding agents to treat drug-resistant bacteria without harming humans is increasingly difficult, drug development is outrageously expensive at around $1 billion per drug, and the cost of antibiotics is generally low.
In a PBS report online, Brad Spellberg, MD, an infectious disease specialist at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, explains: “We’re not comfortable as a society paying more than say $100, $200 for an antibiotic course, because we’ve been sort of spoiled by the penicillin experience. We’re willing to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for cancer chemotherapy but we’re not willing to do that for antibiotics.”
Medical errors
According to a study released earlier this year in the Journal of Patient Safety, somewhere between 210,000 and 444,000 preventable deaths occur annually in our nation’s hospitals because of medical errors. Hospital-acquired infections (just one type of medical error) cost $9.8 billion every year and result in thousands of deaths. This is unacceptable, but continues to plague our industry.
Another medical error, retained objects, such as sponges or other equipment left inside patients’ bodies after surgery — something that sounds egregious — are more common than you’d think. Earlier this month, The Joint Commission released a Sentinel Event Alert on retained foreign objects. From 2005 to 2012, there were 772 reported incidents of retained objects, though more are likely to have occurred and not been reported. Each event is estimated to cost an average of $166,000 — close to $200k in additional costs to the healthcare system because of one easily avoidable error.
As I thought about what other “scary” stories to include in this post, there were a few other major ones I considered including. However, the two profiled here stood out so much above the others as appalling and shocking that it seemed to me inappropriate to include the other issues, that while scary, are so much less high stakes. The remaining issues and my rationale for not covering them in depth here:
- The nightmare of Healthcare.gov — A major headache, but its technical issues will most likely will be remedied soon and, once remedied, will provide subsidized health coverage to millions of Americans (a good thing for hospitals).
- Data breaches — Easily preventable yet frequent. Costly and harmful to patients, but the harm is to privacy and bank accounts, not health and livelihood.
- Layoffs — Rampant, a PR nightmare for hospitals, but in some cases required to keep sustainable margins. Deeply troubling to those laid off, especially if they’re not provided assistance in finding new employment. Leads to financial distress for those laid off, but not directly to declines in health or livelihood.
So, to summarize my rationale: While there are a lot of scary things going on in healthcare, two of these things are killing people on a daily basis, and despite efforts, the medical community has achieved little improvement in reducing either in the last five years. To me, that’s what’s most frightening of all.
