This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2014, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Some Utah Republicans are so desperate to make a case against Obamacare that they are even attempting some old Jedi mind tricks.
A few weeks ago, state Rep. Mike Kennedy, R-Alpine, tried to put his best, "These aren't the droids you're looking for" moves on the Utah Legislature Health Reform Task Force. He argued that the state might not really be doing poor folks a favor if it would expand Medicaid, per the Affordable Care Act, or otherwise join the civilized world in opening access to the health care system to all, regardless of wealth.
As previously reported by my colleague Paul Rolly, and others, Kennedy, who is a doctor, argued that people who are lucky enough to have insurance to cover hospital stays, prescriptions and other miracles of modern medicine might sometimes wish they didn't.
Folks, after all, can have bad reactions to drugs. Pick up secondary, drug-resistant infections in hospitals. Wake up — or not — from surgery with overlooked instruments remaining in their chest cavities.
It's #firstworldproblems big time. Shoot, if someone as rich and famous as the late comic Joan Rivers could go into cardiac arrest during a minor procedure at a swanky Manhattan clinic, and die a few days later at top-flight Mount Sinai Hospital, how desirable can modern medicine really be?
It's like the conservative idea that homeless people like living that way, minimum wage earners just lack ambition, prison inmates are lucky to have a bed and three meals a day and the slaves of the American South were — or should have been — content to live a carefree life, fed, housed and clothed by their benevolent masters, leaving them enough spare time and energy to invent jazz.
Kennedy threw out a number of more than a million people who die every year from maladies that can reasonably be traced to hospital errors. Less ad libbed estimates, from the feds and medical journals, run from maybe a quarter to half a million such deaths a year. That's still an awful lot, enough to make hospital errors the third leading cause of death in the U.S., trailing only heart disease and cancer.
Hospital errors are a painful, deadly and expensive problem. But here's what the folks who are constantly trying to shoot holes in Obamacare aren't telling you and, in the case of Utah lawmakers, probably don't know and aren't interested in learning.
There's an app for that.
Recent numbers out of the Department of Health and Human Services note that hospital-acquired infections are way down over the past couple of years, so much so that new procedures may have saved some 15,000 lives over the years 2011 and 2012.
Part of the reason for that is that Obamacare brought with it rules that hospitals with a lot of secondary infections suffered by Medicaid and Medicare patients would be docked in their federal payments. That gives those hospitals a big, fat, free market reason to be extra careful so they don't have to readmit patients they've already treated. Or report their deaths.
The knock on Obamacare is that it doesn't do enough to control costs. The knock on every attempt anyone ever suggests to control costs is that spending less on health care automatically means getting less. Which is when everybody screams, "Death panels!"
But quality control measures can bring us more and cost us less. Private insurers can, and sometimes do, impose such controls. But their clout is much less than Medicaid and Medicare. Only those payers, with Obamacare-based improvements, are likely to make a significant difference in the way health care services are delivered.
To poor folks and, yes, to those of us whose lives are so unfairly threatened by our own affluence.
George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, refuses to impose any quality control measures on his own health. They don't taste good.
Twitter: @debatestate