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What Scares Doctors? Being the Patient Hospitalization too often means insufficient time with the doctor, errors in treatment and a big bill that adds insult to injury. Weighing in with tales of botched operations and battles for reimbursement, patients and caregivers alike offered their prescriptions for healing an ailing system too focused on the bottom line...
Your story on the harrowing experiences that doctors have had as hospital patients [May 1] only scratched the surface of what is wrong with our health-care system, which is in a rapid downhill spiral. The interests of consumers and caregivers are losing out, and the winners are the publicly traded insurance companies, which make hundreds of millions in profit as they cut patient services. Why are those companies allowed to make such huge sums of money while some hospitals cannot afford to upgrade their technology or are forced to close altogether? It is time for the entire industry...
...double-check medication dosages. We all make mistakes because we are human. But too many physicians avoid oversight and accountability to one another to hide their fallibility. The way to make health care as error free as possible is to ensure that no decision is made in isolation. Patient safety will not improve until doctors lead the way by openly examining what they do and how they do it--and by embracing change. RICHARD BJERKE, M.D. Pittsburgh...
...problems you described can be fixed with sufficient professional and support staff. But even as hospital profits are at all-time highs, staff numbers are being cut. Why don't hospital administrators hire enough staff to provide patients with better, safer care? Money is the answer. Maintaining or increasing current nonphysician staff levels cuts into the bottom line, reducing profits for both the hospitals and doctors. When doctors whine about substandard patient care, they're refusing to recognize that hospitals are understaffed. GEORGE M. DAVIS Fuquay-Varina...
While your overview of the foibles of the U.S. health-care system presented plenty of food for thought, you missed one of the main reasons for its decline. American health care is no longer about the well-being of patients. It's about making money, which means that doctors have to reduce the time they spend with each patient. Until we fix our dysfunctional health-care system, which values dollars more than lives, Americans will continue to be mistreated. TRISHA TORREY Syracuse...