Greedy Trial Lawyer
Are They Shooting Heart Attack Patients At Seven U.S. Hospitals?
Category: Gaming The System
I remember the bell-shaped curves that were used to grade just about every test I ever took in my undergraduate work. According to some dictionaries a bell curve is supposed to be a symmetrical curve representing the normal distribution. All I can say is that I know one when I see it.
An editorial in today's New York Times describes a very special bell-shaped curve manufactured by Medicare to keep the public in the dark concerning hospital mortality rates for cardiac patients. Something is suspicious about a rating system that declares 98% of approximately 4,500 hospitals are average. This is not your average bell-shaped curve.
(Sort of) Rating Hospitals
The federal government deserves a modest pat on the back for identifying hospitals that have the very best -- and very worst -- mortality rates for cardiac patients. One can only hope that the information will goad underachieving hospitals into improving their performance. Unfortunately, the ratings are too broad to help most patients decide which institution they can entrust with their lives.The new ratings -- based on how many Medicare patients die within 30 days of being admitted for a heart attack or heart failure -- were published by federal Medicare officials last week as part of a growing movement to provide more information to medical consumers and to hold hospitals accountable for the quality of care they deliver.
While the hospitals were told how they scored and were given data allowing them to compare their performance with other institutions, the public is being kept mostly in the dark. No mortality numbers for any institution were published. The hospitals instead were lumped into three broad categories -- "better than the national rate," "worse than the national rate" and "no different than the national rate" -- with more than 98 percent placed into the vast middle category.
Of nearly 4,500 hospitals evaluated for heart attack outcomes, 17 were rated better than the national rate, 7 were rated worse and 4,453 were placed in the middle category. Of some 4,800 hospitals evaluated for heart failure outcomes, 38 were better than the national average, 35 were worse and 4,734 were rated no different than the national average.
Think about the absurdity (and the dishonesty) in saying only 7 hospitals out of approximately 4,500 are below average. They must shoot the heart attack patients at these institutions.
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