How many more have to die from hospital-borne infections?

Hospital Infection Rates Are Up Again, And Healthcare Reform Won't Cure It | BNET Health Care Blog | BNET

This is what happens when doctors are granted God-like status. And like all Gods, they have the power over life and death without any oversight because after all, who is higher than God? Here is a great quote from this article "...hospitals are reluctant to discipline doctors who violate safety rules, because some of those doctors admit many of the hospitals’ patients and perform their big-ticket procedures." Hospitals don't want to do anything to rock their financial boat and doctors won't listen to anyone else or, it appears, do something as simple as washing their hands between patients. It is criminal!

The number of infections acquired in hospitals continued to rise in 2009, despite threats of government sanctions and efforts by some hospitals to combat the problem. That’s according to a new report from the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research (AHRQ). Yet Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, the department in which AHRQ resides, claims that the new reform law will help “turn these numbers around” by imposing a one percent Medicare penalty starting in 2015 for hospitals with high infection rates.

Permit me to be skeptical. Back in 2007, Medicare began requiring hospitals to identify secondary diagnoses that patients have when they’re admitted to the hospital or arrive in the ER. In cases where patients develop a secondary condition that was not present on admission, the hospitals don’t get paid extra for treating them. Yet these regulations have not lowered infection rates. It’s unlikely that a one percent reduction in Medicare payments for treating hospital-acquired infections will have a much greater effect.