The Starfield Revelations

JonRappoport   February 9 2014

The Starfield paper can be downloaded (as a .pdf) from here. The paper is fully cited as Starfield B. Is US health really the best in the world?. JAMA. 2000; 284(4):483-4.

Dr. Barbara Starfield’s wiki page is here.

Barack Obama and his allies have done everything they can to bring more people into the US medical system. Changing that system has never occurred to these politicians.

Like much of America, they accept the cliches and slogans about American medicine. “It’s the best in the world.” “People are being denied treatment.” “We must take care of our citizens.”

How about this far more accurate slogan: “Let’s force more Americans to die in the care of doctors.”

The American healthcare system, like clockwork, causes a mind-boggling number of deaths every year.

Dr. Barbara Starfield
Dr. Barbara Starfield

On July 26, 2000, the US medical community received a titanic shock, when one of its most respected public-health experts, Dr. Barbara Starfield, revealed her findings on healthcare in America. Starfield was associated with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

The Starfield study, “Is US health really the best in the world?”, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, came to the following conclusions:

Every year in the US there are:

* 12,000 deaths from unnecessary surgeries;

* 7,000 deaths from medication errors in hospitals;

* 20,000 deaths from other errors in hospitals;

* 80,000 deaths from infections acquired in hospitals;

* 106,000 deaths from FDA-approved correctly prescribed medicines.

The total of medically-caused deaths in the US every year is 225,000. That’s 2.25 MILLION deaths per decade.

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