More infection control woes

This HND piece examines the ongoing, ever ongoing problem of highly preventable infection control breaches. As I point out: Obamacare is driven by the "quite absurd notion that lack of universal insurance coverage is the biggest problem facing American health care."

Hardly. The biggest problem facing American health care is that we are paying drastically more than any other country in the world for our care, but our outcomes on average are markedly inferior. The single most important reason for this pathetic state of affairs is that our system hugely favors procedural and acute medicine over cognitive and preventive medicine.

Not surprisingly, infection control is a stepchild, even though there are at least 1.7 million healthcare-associated infections each year in the US, causing 99,000 deaths. Nearly all of these are preventable. This piece discusses two current cases.