Marty Markary M.D. – Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care (Bloomsbury Press)

Full disclosure up front: my full-time career is in the health care field on the marketing side rather than the clinical. Even before I went to work in health care, I was fascinated by the reports of avoidable medical errors and the harm, if not outright death that they caused. The numbers that get thrown around are staggering, in the neighborhood of 100,000 deaths per year according to some reports.

But what is at the root of those errors? In Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care, Dr. Marty Markary, a surgeon at the prestigious Johns Hopkins Hospital would have you believe that it is a combination of contributing factors, but the blame rest solely at the feet of hospital administrators and the incompetent practitioners and unsafe practices that they allow to continue at their facilities.

While there is certainly ample evidence to support Markary’s claims, by the same token I think he is too quick to downplay other contributing factors including: ambulance chasing attorneys, the government at both state and federal levels, and even the patients themselves.

Markary claims that transparency would cure many of the ills in healthcare, but he neglects to account for the massive costs of litigation, risk management and the increase in costs that go hand in hand. Hospitals, both non-profit and for profit feel the need to circle the wagons to protect themselves from the vultures overhead.

While regulation is necessary to ensure competent care delivery, the government also contributes to the problem with its lack of uniform interpretation of its own regulations on the state level and don’t even get me started on the rules and regulations involved with Medicare, HIPPA, and the tangled mess of Obamacare.

While Markary is quick to indict the health care system he chooses to ignore the patient’s contribution to the problem of medical errors. I would have to bet that on more than a few occasions in his career Dr. Markary has been confronted by a problem that’s root cause can be traced to a patient that was less than forthcoming with information about their own health status or their own habits and vices. And if we are being truly honest, how many of us as patients haven’t told our doctors the whole story about our condition or maybe waited a little too long between visits to address a health issue?

Certainly there are incompetent, over-worked, under-staffed, situations that occur in healthcare that contribute to the problem Markary puts forth, but the issues are certainly much more global in nature than he would have you believe.