There are some hospitals like Kaiser that provide great service at a low cost. I was connected with them at one time when and employer offered them as a choice. While others had deductibles and co-pays, Kaiser was totally covered. But if the employer won’t offer you Kaiser’s plan, you have no choice but to go where the employer tells you to.
Kaiser may be able to offer more for less based on cutting costs. One big cost is lawsuits. If Kaiser can reduce medical errors that result when the metric system is not used, they can reduce the cost of lawsuits. The only reason I can think for the government not forcing the medical industry in the name of safety to operate completely in the metric system is because it would appear as an attack on America’s sacred cow. The Luddites would be in an uproar. My mother is in the hospital presently and when I visited the other day the nurse was taking her temperature. The digital thermometer read out 37°C, so I know this hospital is using metric. I commented to the nurse about the hospital using modern units. I assure you though, if someone important were to die from a dosing error related to a unit conversion error, the use of metric in the metrical industry would be come law and any complaints would mean trouble for the complainer. From: Carleton MacDonald Sent: Tuesday, 2014-07-15 12:23 To: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:54155] RE: Accidental Overdose: Parents Are Terrible at Measuring Kids' Meds This article was also in The Washington Post yesterday. My current health care providers still use colonial units. I don’t know how they handle this particular situation. I used to be with Kaiser Permanente (for 35 years, through 2006) until my employer took away that option. Now that I am (barely) eligible for Medicare I’m going to go back to Kaiser, beginning next year (I’m stuck with my current provider until then). In the last couple of years with Kaiser I noted that the scales were all in kg and there was a conversion chart next to the scale. I’m assuming they still do that (Kaiser Mid-Atlantic, that is). http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/spoonfuls-can-lead-to-medicine-errors-study-finds/2014/07/13/fd8ed0a4-0ac2-11e4-929c-4cd4865c3725_story.html Carleton From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2014 11:26 To: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:54154] Accidental Overdose: Parents Are Terrible at Measuring Kids' Meds Thanks to Linda Anderman who tweeted this to me: Parents aren’t doing a great job measuring out medications for their little ones — and the problem may be that we’re still using the so-called English system rather than switching to the metric system, a new study shows. Busy multitasking parents make all kinds of medication errors, such as reading tablespoons for teaspoons, which results in three times the dose, or substituting a kitchen spoon for an actual teaspoon. That may at least partially explain the more than 10,000 annual calls to poison centers, researchers suggested in the study published Monday in Pediatrics. The researchers found that when parents were given a prescription in teaspoons or tablespoons nearly 40 percent measured wrong, while more than 40 percent read the dosage off the prescription wrong. When prescriptions were written in metric units parents were half as likely to make mistakes. The findings suggest that medicines should switch to a milliliter-only standard, the researchers say. http://www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-health/accidental-overdose-parents-are-terrible-measuring-kids-meds-n153926 David Pearl www.MetricPioneer.com 503-428-4917
