Created Equal, BUT NOT Treated Equally

Reports indicate that surviving a hospital stay depends as much on where you go as on what is wrong with you. It seems that Medicare patients at hospitals ranked in the top 5 percent have a 27 percent lower chance of dying and a 14 percent lower risk of developing complications. As I've previously reported, there are tens of thousands of preventable deaths in hospitals every year. Latest estimates are between 44,000 & 98,000 die, unnecessarily each year. And that's JUST deaths. Other serious, complications would expand that number exponentially.

Couple this with Bush's latest budget proposal, that seeks to cut $36 billion in savings from the U.S. Medicare plan and you see we have a problem in this country. Much of this cut is expected to come from hospitals, nursing homes and other health care service providers. Long-term acute care hospitals will fare worst of all, having their payment rates frozen for patients in Medicare, which provides insurance for 42 million elderly and disabled in this country.
Yes Doctors and hospitals are criminal in their fees, but until THAT problem is solved, we are at their mercy and that means paying the ransoms they demand. Not doing so only puts patients health at further risk.
What else it does NOT mean is further hurting patients by "capping" lawsuit awards. All this does is similar to what happens in the case of another use of "capping" - "kneecapping" - it cripples already wrongly injured patients and their families.