« Medicare Conflict of Interest | Main | Ethics and the FDA »

January 08, 2006

Comments

Fred Jones

I would like to remind you that these figures do not include the larger figures of 'defensive medicine'. Try this report from the HHS. Interesting to say the least.

aspe.hhs.gov/daltcp/reports/litrefm.pdf

Kate

Fred, that's a position paper from the administration, not research done by HHS, and completely full of lies.

There is no outbreak of clinics closing because of malpractice costs. And with all the medical errors out there, it seems we could use a bit of defensive medicine.

But the bottom line is that defensive medicine is made up. Tomorrow I'll be posting extensively on it, so come back for your full take-down.

shadowfax

I wish people would stop quoting the 100,000 figure from the IOM study. I wonk on patient safety in our hospital, and I am an advocate for patient safety, and in a perverse way I am a little happy that the publicity from the IOM study has focused attention on patient safety.

But the study was crap. It contains so many methodological errors that the results cannot be taken at face value. It has been thoroughly discredited on an academic level, but it got so much play in the media and the political world that it has become the conventional wisdom.

Sigh.

The comments to this entry are closed.

Site meter