Former President Billl Clinton was in Dana Point on Monday to speak at an OC summit including medical device makers, doctors and surgeons about how to eliminate the 200,000 yearly unnecessary patient deaths in the U.S.
He appeared at the Summit where he blamed an increasingly complex and "encrusted" U.S. healthcare system for ballooning expenses, sicker patients and unnecessary deaths.
Clinton said decades of adding conflicting rules and stopgap measures to an outdated health bureaucracy has lead to a bewildering and Byzantine system that accidentally kills 200,000 patients per year in the U.S.
"There’s no devil here," he said. "We have an encrusted system that's killing people, not because there's somebody lurking behind the curtain.”
"There need be no evildoers in this story. There's just human nature and the nature of human development,” he added. “Institutions have become ossified and rigid... where position is more important than purpose, or people get overwhelmed by complexity."
The aim of the conference is to sign up manufacturers and developers of health monitoring devices to share information with one another to further the goal of reducing unnecessary patient deaths in the United States.
Eight major manufacturers Monday announced their commitment to share information with each other to create a "health data superhighway," which would automatically warn clinicians, patients and families of symptoms indicating an upcoming heart attack, seizure or other health threat.
