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Joe Graedon: Medical Mistakes Killed My Mother, Doctors Need To Earn A Salary (VIDEO)

How Medical Mistakes Killed My Mother

Matthew Heineman's new documentary "Escape Fire" argues that the American healthcare system is broken, but not for the reasons politicians speak about. Heineman's film looks at potential solutions, including the notion that the fee-for-service system improperly rewards quantity rather than quality when it comes to medical care.

HuffPost Live's Alicia Menendez hosted Heineman, Dr. Erin Martin, Dr. Steven Nissen and Joe Graedon Monday for a discussion of the broken healthcare system.

Graedon, a pharmacologist whose mother died following medical mistakes, blamed overworked doctors for his mother's death.

"They wanted to put in a stent, she may or may not have needed it, but it led to her death," he said of his mother. "It led to her death because of a series of mistakes because people were in a hurry."

Graedon argued that doctors should make a salary rather than be compensated based on how many procedures they do.

"If you think back to the industrial revolution, we had sweat shops and we did away with them because we realized that piecework was inhumane. But that's what we're doing to our doctors and our nurses today. It's piecework," he said. "They're getting rewarded for the more they do. If you give children a dollar for every pinecone they pick up, they'll pick up a lot of pinecones. If you give an interventional cardiologist hundreds of dollars for every stent that he or she puts in, they will do a lot of stents. Doctors need to be paid a salary rather than piecework."

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