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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Sounds like yet another failure of free enterprise and for-profit medicine. It sounds like the government needs to remove GPO's anti-trust exemptions, ban kick-backs, and generally step up regulation. Still, I'm glad to hear that government-run hospitals such as the VA have adopted the safer needles.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Another bias at work (I don't know the name offhand): One of my my initial reactions was that of course the auto industry should cut 75% of auto accident deaths, but 75% of catheter infection deaths is just a small part of the total deaths that happen in hospitals, so there's not reason they should focus on that. Clearly this is insane.

The only way I think this would hold up is if implementing the fix would really cause so much inefficiency as to create more deaths elsewhere, but that doesn't seem likely to me.

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