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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated
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To: KLP who wrote (310089)6/15/2009 7:08:09 PM
From: jrhana4 Recommendations  Read Replies (1) of 793797
 
<in the naive hope that bureaucrats are the answer to our health care system's shortcomings ->

Someone once did a study showing that in someone admitted to the hospital with pneumonia, giving antibiotics early is good. Hell I could have told you that without a study.

Anyway some bureaucrat somewhere gets a hold of this idea and obsesses on it. They laid down the law: everyone who arrives in the Emergency Department with pneumonia must get antibiotics within 4 hours of arrival.

They forgot one thing. Sometimes the diagnosis is unclear. Sometimes people who seem to have one thing actually develop something else.

And pneumonia became interchangeable with pulmonary infiltrate.
And radiologists often say in their verbose reports possible pulmonary infiltrate versus chronic scaring.

And sometimes cat scans show things that aren't obvious on X-rays.

Anyway doctors started getting letters stating that so and so who had a pulmonary infiltrate did not get their antibiotics within 4 hours. Who cares that the patient did not need antibiotics and had some entirely different condition. These letters stated that further violations can result in loss of hospital privileges and even your medical license. And the hospital would be threatened with loss of medicare funding for repeated "violations".

So massive amounts of very unnecessary antibotics were given in the ED. Powerful antibiotics. Zithromax, Rocephin, Tequin, Levaquin.

This antibotic over usage caused an epidemic of clostridium dificil diarrhea which is not a completely benign condition by any means. And it undoubtedly helped encourage the spread of MRSA.

So some bureaucrat in Washington decided he knew better when and to whom give antibiotics than the patients own doctor and literally caused a huge amount of unnecessary expense not to mention all the complications caused by the unnecessary antibiotics. And this was happening nationwide.

Yeah they will do a great job with health care.
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