You can argue all you want about whether it's a good metric for surgery quality or not, but if you're being discharged soon after surgery, the idea is that your surgery went well enough that you don't need to be around $50mil worth of life-saving equipment 24/7. It has a valid place in the system, with pros and cons like any other metric.
Hospitals are full of all kinds of hard-to-kill microorganisms. They really are not good places to stay after a major traumatic event (e.g. surgery) if you don't need the resources of the system; staying will only increase your chances of getting a life-threatening infection. When I get home from the hospital, I try to change out of my clothes as soon as possible for this very reason.
As for pain medication, well...one only needs to look at the enormous rise of opioid addiction and prescription medicine abuse in the USA to see that moderation of these very dangerous medications is in the patient's best interest.
The medical system is far from perfect, but don't operate on the assumption that the people working in the field are ignorant of the problems you're pointing out. There are many things we could be doing better, especially on the transparency and patient education side of things, but it's a huge industry and big ships turn slowly.
Patient education is the only issue here, but most of the public has no desire to know anything about their care. They want a magic pill they can pop which will make it all better and they want to sit in a hospital as long as they feel like. This is because they aren't cognizant of the cost associated with them sitting around like a fool soaking up thousands of dollars in resources per day when they could be sitting at home healing instead.
One of the biggest flaws with the American health care system and single payer as well is that it's removed the cost component from peoples considerations of what care they should receive. We all pay for this idiocy in the form of our skyrocketing insurance premiums. Do you really think people would want to sit in a hospital if they actually had to pay the nursing staff $1000 per day out of pocket? If they had to pay the janitor $20 for coming into the room to clean up the mess they'd made? $200 for the physician followup? Of course not.
The above poster complaining about withholding opiates and statistically backed discharge time frames is a huge part of what's wrong with health care across the developed world- not just the US.
Hospitals are full of all kinds of hard-to-kill microorganisms. They really are not good places to stay after a major traumatic event (e.g. surgery) if you don't need the resources of the system; staying will only increase your chances of getting a life-threatening infection. When I get home from the hospital, I try to change out of my clothes as soon as possible for this very reason.
As for pain medication, well...one only needs to look at the enormous rise of opioid addiction and prescription medicine abuse in the USA to see that moderation of these very dangerous medications is in the patient's best interest.
The medical system is far from perfect, but don't operate on the assumption that the people working in the field are ignorant of the problems you're pointing out. There are many things we could be doing better, especially on the transparency and patient education side of things, but it's a huge industry and big ships turn slowly.