What Senate Republicans did, or rather failed to do on restricting gun sales Thursday was arguably surpassed by what they voted to do on Obamacare and Planned Parenthood. That is, they voted proactively to take health care away from millions of people—17 million under Obamacare and more than five million at Planned Parenthood. Let's look at just one aspect of this: deaths prevented by the patient safety measures in Obamacare.
Hospitals have cut down on deadly medical errors, saving around 87,000 lives since 2010, according to a new government report. […]On Tuesday, the agency announced its latest findings on these “hospital-acquired conditions,” based on preliminary data from 2014. For every 1,000 patients admitted to and then discharged from a hospital, the agency found, roughy 121 of them developed such a condition. That rate is unchanged from last year, but it is down 17 percent from 2010, when it was about 145 out of every 1,000 patients.
Based on the existing research about what happens to patients who get sick in the hospital and what it costs to treat them afterwards, that decline works out to roughly 87,000 lives saved and $19.8 billion not spent on extra medical care, according to the report.
David Blumenthal, president of the Commonwealth Fund and a researcher and physician says that this decline in preventable, medical-error deaths, is "historic. […] We have never demonstrated a comparable decline in the history of the U.S. health system." And prior to 2010, we never had a national law that made patient safety a priority and provided large incentives, as well as penalties, to hospitals to make it happen. So, yeah, Obamacare has saved about 87,000 lives just in reducing medical errors alone. That's not counting all the people who got health insurance and potentially lifesaving treatment. Which is easily tens of thousands more.
What Republicans proved Thursday is that they're totally okay with random, preventable death whether by assault weapons, scalpels, or neglect. Unless, of course, it's zygote death. That they take a stand against. The woman housing that zygote? She can be randomly gunned down or whatever.
