Your publication plays an important role in informing people, and this extends to your editorial page as well. I’m here to take you to task for putting false and misleading information into your own editorials.
In the March 25 lead editorial, about Obamacare, you state that a patient with diabetes can, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, get primary care “instead of waiting until they need an emergency amputation.”
Yet there is no proven link between getting primary care and avoiding amputations.
A 2015 study, “Regional and Racial Variation in Primary Care and the Quality of Care among Medicare Beneficiaries,” concluded:
“There is no relationship between having at least one annual visit with a primary care clinician and the rate of leg amputation.”
It’s woefully common to make statements that make intuitive sense, but are not borne out by science. You owe it to your readership to avoid this.
It’s also important to put things into perspective, which you failed to do in your mention of infections. It’s inaccurate to credit the ACA with turning the tide on this issue.
Ten years before the ACA, LeapFrog Group started publishing infection rates and encouraging purchasers to use this data to choose hospitals.
In 2004, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations added infection rate to its standards.
Further, according to a 2014 study published in the online journal JAMA Network, surgical infections are relatively uncommon, at an average of 3 per 1,000 surgical procedures in the United States.
As you say in your editorial, health care policy is complicated. Misinformation only makes it more so.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
