This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 20, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown. American Health Care Kills

and it's because markets for health care services are grossly distorted.

That's the assessment of David Goldhill whose father died of a hospital acquired infection.

He wrote up what he learned about health care in America for the Atlantic Monthly.

The article was entitled How American Health Care Killed My Father.

We spoke following a Cato Capitol Hill briefing held October 1st, 2009. This is a portion of our discussion.

My father, a couple years ago, walked into a hospital with pneumonia and within 36 hours had contracted sepsis and over the course of the next five weeks

a series of other infections acquired in the hospital which he ultimately died from.

Obviously, an extraordinary personal tragedy and one that was very painful at the time and remains painful to this day.

And shortly after my father's day, the time and remains painful to this day.

And shortly after my father's death, though,

I became aware of something that I think

is of more general interest and struck me

as extraordinary, which is that my father was just one of an estimated

hundred thousand people who every year die from an infection they get in a

hospital and that a substantial number of those are thought to be preventable.

There was a piece that came out in New Yorker magazine by Dr. Gowandy, just almost within

a month, maybe it was just two weeks after my father died, in which he talked about

a physician who was running around the country trying to convince hospitals to adopt a series of

protocols for their intensive care units that had enormous impact on reducing the number of these

deaths and how much difficulty he was having talking hospitals into it.

...