Comments on: Healthcare Update 01-06-2010

By: Healthcare Update - Satellite Edition 2-18-2010

Healthcare Update - Satellite Edition 2-18-2010 — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:51:09 +0000

[...] New Orleans hospital settles lawsuit alleging failure to plan properly for Hurricaine Katrina. See previous comments on the case in an earlier Healthcare Update. [...]

By: Matt

Matt — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 18:50:53 +0000

It’s funny to read this quote from WC about the doc who was sued for sexual assault:

“I don’t know all the facts, so I can’t comment upon the merits of the case or upon the jury’s verdict.”

and then read his comments about every other malpractice lawsuit. Commenting without the facts, based solely on conjecture and speculation, is normally his stock in trade when it comes to legal matters.

By: Matt

Matt — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 18:42:25 +0000

“3) all of our bills will now go up to pay for this $15M verdict”

Paul, your statement is inaccurate for a number of reasons:

1. $15 million wasn’t paid. Read the article. They had agreed on a high-low settlement, most likely because the hospital and physicians knew they had screwed up. After all, as the article points out there wasn’t a lot of hard damages in this case with years of ongoing care.
2. As far as bills going up, if you’re talking about patients bills, that’s unlikely, given how medical care is paid for in this country. One verdict of less than .01% of the total healthcare cost will have literally no effect.
3. If you’re talking about malpractice bills, you have no clue what will happen since you don’t know who the carrier was, or if there was even a carrier since it seems there might have been some intentional tort allegations here which might not have been covered by insurance. Perhaps you missed this part of the article:

“The board reopened the investigation last year after learning that the hospital may not have provided complete information about the treatment the doctors gave Jason.”

4. Even assuming you’re right, if the allegations of “not providing complete information”, ie. lying about what happened, maybe about the piece of metal found in the child’s brain, are true, what would you suggest we do about them? A good scolding? Jail the liars?

5. As to WC’s comment about a “chilling effect”, given that he knows only what this article says about the case, and has not seen the records or knows anything about the “incomplete information” or the metal left in the child’s brain, it would seem based on the article that the thing that would be chilled would be sloppiness with your instruments and lying about the medical records. Which would seem to be good things to minimize.

By: WhiteCoat

WhiteCoat — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:46:10 +0000

Also note the chilling effect that many people stated the verdict would have on willingness of these surgeons to operate on similar cases in the future.
Would a judgment like this make it less likely that any of the surgeons who read this blog would perform risky surgeries?

By: midwest woman

midwest woman — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:34:25 +0000

ageed…it sounded like they were between a rock and a hard spot.

By: steve

steve — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:46:47 +0000

I too feel the individual mandate is unconstitutional, but I think the bigger issue is that it doesn’t actually address the fundamental problems with the healthcare industry. It is amazing that going into the 21st century, America still is so backwards compared to most other “western” cultures.

By: paul

paul — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:39:51 +0000

surprisingly level-headed comments on the globe page about that tet case. would agree with the consensus:
1) it’s tragic that such a young kid died, whether or not there was actual malpractice committed
2) there’s not enough info in the article to determine whether or not actual malpractice was committed
3) all of our bills will now go up to pay for this $15M verdict

By: midwest woman

midwest woman — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 13:54:54 +0000

Europeans express surprise about the speed with which an appendectomy is performed in the US…. A co-worker’s father was seen in another ER for severe abdominal pain, triaged low and waited hours. Finally left and came to our ER where they seen…perforated bowel. Bad docs and bad nurses everywhere maybe. Just playing devil’s advocate here.

By: uberVU - social comments

uberVU - social comments — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 01:07:07 +0000

Social comments and analytics for this post…

This post was mentioned on Twitter by epmonthly: The Mayo Clinic is no longer accepting Medicare patients, the system lost more than $800 million last year. http://bit.ly/5J4FyU…

By: CrankyProf

CrankyProf — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:01:05 +0000

(I should add that, thanks to EMTALA, there’s no such thing as “uninsured who won’t be accepted at hospitals.” )