Kaiser Health News and USA Today make false and misleading claims against ASCs. We rebuke those claims.

Kaiser Health News and USA Today titled, "As Surgery Centers Boom, Patients Are Paying With Their Lives." 

The article shares the investigations that found 260 patients over a five year period of time did suffer a compromise in the outpatient surgery setting. What their report did not state was the flip side to this "failure" is a huge "success" in that ASCs have done over 200 Million Procedures Safely over the same time period of the last five years. This equates to a percentage of only .0000013 "failed rate".  IOW*: 0%

The Kaiser Health News and USA Today go onto say in their report that there were a total of twelve instances where a surgery center was not in full compliance.  The article again, it did its readers a major disservice by not sharing the facts that there are a total of 5,616 ASCs Certified by CMS as of today.  This equates to .00213 percentage of "incident of non-compliance" rate.

For the average reader, their personal opinion of the work that surgery centers do across the United States is now forever tainted by this misuse of data and statistical calculations.  I cannot personally rebuke their claims as I was not part of the investigations and fact gathering.  But, I can voice that information that I am aware of and the stats that I know and know of its origination.  Surgery Centers are still a very safe place to have a surgical event as they are easier to get scheduled, easier on the surgeons, more cost-effective when it comes to the staff and supplies, and are safer than being admitted into a hospital where the probability of becoming sicker from the ill patients is much greater than the probability of expiring in the ASC.

Evidently, these reporters obtained their investigational skills and their statistical skills from the Bankrupt Trump University where character and moral compass are no longer the pre-requisite.