Talk about drive-thru medical care … North Carolina man tries to commit suicide by crashing his truck at a high rate of speed … into the ICU entrance of a hospital.
So should the pedestrians be hunted down and charged with murder? Man tries to help woman who is being beaten and becomes a victim himself. The assailant stabs him several times in the torso. He laid in a pool of his own blood while people walked around him, stopped and stared briefly before continuing on their way, or stopped and took pictures of him. Ninety minutes later, he was dead and no one had helped him. All of the passers by were caught on security camera.
Where have the morals in this country gone? This article has some answers.
When something is dead and you don’t know what to do with it, bring it to pathology. When something is alive and you don’t know what to do with it, bring it to the emergency department. Canadian police are having difficulty deciding what to do with multiple intoxicated patients arrested each day. After one intoxicated patient died in a police “drunk tank,” the RCMP are now bringing 15-20 intoxicated patients per day to the hospital for “medical clearance.”
In a related story, family members and several comments to the article are calling for murder charges to be filed against the police. Using Canada’s definition of homicide – “a person, by an act or omission, does any thing that results in the death of a human being, he causes the death of that human being notwithstanding that death from that cause might have been prevented by resorting to proper means” – could the family also be accused of murder by failing to help the patient get alcohol counseling?
“When this ER closes everybody’s unsafe,” says one nurse as she watched St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York close its doors this week. Prior to closing, the hospital’s debt topped $1 billion due to caring for New York City’s poor and uninsured patients. Now the closest Level I trauma center in New York’s lower West side is more than 2 miles away — in NYC traffic.
Oklahoma cuts state mental health budget. More and more patients with mental illness or substance abuse problems end up in the emergency departments. “We’re going to be more and more busy, and we’re going to lose opportunities and possibly lose lives. That’s a loss for society. Prevention is the way to go,” says one trauma surgeon.
Oklahoma’s response? Expect 12 percent more cuts in the near future.
Don’t worry, though, now everyone has insurance with the health reform bill. Problem solved.
Another entry in the “you don’t appreciate it until it’s gone” category. Large water main break near Boston means that 2 million people must boil water for at least a minute before ingesting it. Restaurants stop serving water, ice, and fountain drinks. Surgeons at hospitals were ordered to use bottled water to scrub before surgeries. Scrubbing with Evian? How gauche.
Bret Michaels improving? Treating physician states the Poison singer has an “unbelievable fight in him.” News conference on his condition planned for Tuesday. Keep the faith, Bret and family!
Should you have to pay for “balance billing” by a physician or not? Most people commenting on this article didn’t believe so. Another wrench in the system caused by the squeeze from insurance companies.
Simple solution in most circumstances: When prices for any services or medical testing are not clearly posted in advance, those services are free. Enable consumers to make a free market decision on how much they pay for care.
Not so fast on that health care overhaul, there POTUS … there’s already legislation seeking to repeal the hugely popular “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”
Folding just a little too soon … Nurse settles malpractice case for $1 million during jury deliberations, then finds out that the jury exonerated her. Ouch.
Tough life being a medical malpractice plaintiff’s attorney. Just ask Thomas and Adam Malone as they fly their 11 seat airplanes between homes in the Bahamas, Palm Beach and the Chattahoochee River. They get 40% of gross recovery and have had more than one verdict higher than $45 million. Hey – jet fuel isn’t getting any cheaper, you know.
Medical malpractice case filings drop 39% in Pennsylvania, but rise by 60% in one Pennsylvania county. Know why? The Pennsylvania Supreme Court changed two procedural rules, requiring a professional to certify a case before it can be filed and requiring lawsuits to be filed in the county in which the alleged malpractice took place. Prior to the change, plaintiffs used to shop all around the state for more favorable forums. Columbia-Montour judicial district – home to two hospitals – saw the number of malpractice claims rise dramatically after the change in law. Last year two malpractice cases in that county went to trial and both ended in defense verdicts.
Even international medical malpractice insurers avoid the US. If you engage in medical tourism abroad, a company has created a new insurance policy for you. For example, if you’re from England and want a face lift in Thailand, you pay $389 to be eligible for payment of up to $100,000 in additional costs arising from medical complications – including reimbursement of legal fees for med mal claims.
Only catch is that you can’t purchase the policy if you’re a US resident and you can’t use the policy for treatment in the US.
Wunda wyyy that isth … (sorry, my tongue was in my cheek so the words were getting a little slurred)
The situation with Tale-Yax’s death is a horrible thing. People need to use their own brains! Think for yourself! If you are rightly worried about your own safety, at least call those that will respond. If a situation doesn not look right to you – call someone.
As I commented at the article: We’re *used* to seeing drunk people lying in the streets of big cities, and that’s probably what most of the people who saw the guy thought of him.
There are no more payphones, and cell phones are not even close to anonymous. Get involved in reporting a crime, and either the police or some gang will often make you regret it. I read a story about a small girl who walked out into the night without her parents noticing, and froze to death. A man later said he saw her alone by the road, but was afraid to stop because of all the reports where false claims of child molestation destroy real families. The risk of reporting crime is substantial.
Balance billing makes me so angry, not necessarily at the providers but at the situation as a whole. If there was some way to know up-front how much I would end up paying after insurance it would be one thing…but no, that’s not allowable. Grr.
In Canada, common law and precident plays a huge role in our court system – probably moreso than it does in the US system. Canadian common law is that to be charged with the equivalent to first or second degree murder, you have to actively try to kill the person. First degree murder requires that you have premeditation. Second degree murder is more spur-of-the-moment thing, but you’d still have to actively try to kill the person. Manslaughter is for when you try to hurt the person but don’t actually intend to kill them but wind up killing them by mistake (such as a guy who suckerpunches someone and gives that person a freak fatal head injury), and if you were negligent but not actually malicious, there’s criminal negligence causing death.
As far as I know, if the dead drunk guy was underage, there might be a case for criminal negligence causing death against the family if and only if there’s evidence that they made no attempt to get the guy help. If he’s of the age of majority, it’s assumed he’s responsible for himself.
The cops might be charged with criminal negligence causing death since, under Canadian common law, when they took him into custody, they effectively became responsible for his well-being, but the standard for a conviction in that situation is pretty high since there are plenty of criminals who will fake serious illness to get out of jail for a while.
Then again, I’m not a Canadian lawyer; I just took a few law classes in high school, so this info might be completely out in left field, but that’s my understanding of it.
Re: Pennsylvania. Expert review required before filing a grievance = Mexico’s CONAMED?
I’ve never really understood why physicians want to go the route of saying things are unfair because someone they oppose has a lot of money. If you’re good at what you do, and your clients or patients are willing to pay you for it, what business of anyone else’s is it?
Given that physicians make on average 5 times the amount of the average salary in the US, it would seem that trying to create resentment of others through class warfare will only backfire. In fact, you already do complain when the media highlights your incomes and it becomes the subject of efforts to cut healthcare cost. You rightly point out the education, skill, intelligence, etc. to do your jobs.
There are physicians in my town with jets. Should I resent them because they’ve been successful, WC?
“Only catch is that you can’t purchase the policy if you’re a US resident and you can’t use the policy for treatment in the US.
Wunda wyyy that isth … (sorry, my tongue was in my cheek so the words were getting a little slurred)”
Perhaps your thinking was a little slurred as well. You can buy insurance to cover complications resulting from overseas procedures. From US companies. Here’s an article over 2 years old about the companies that were starting to do it then. And insurers are nothing if not innovative in looking for additional sources of income (right, AIG?) so there’s almost certainly more.
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/nov2008/gb2008119_571910.htm
Perhaps you were confused because you thought this was malpractice coverage, when it’s really just additional health insurance. It may not even require “malpractice” to trigger coverage.
If your implication is that you wouldn’t sell to US citizens because of malpractice claims, that doesn’t make much sense either. But I don’t want to speculate since it’s clear that you misunderstood the product being offered in the first place.
Matt,
Physicians do not think the current malpractice system is “unfair” because the plaintiff’s attorneys make a lot of money. Please see innumerable previous posts about this and what the real issues are that doctors have with the current system, which are useless to rehash. A lot of doctors, and others, do feel that one unfortunate aspect of the current system, which has nothing to do with “fairness”, is that a lot of the money involved goes to legal fees, and more of it should ideally go to the injured parties, but I know you disagree with this view, feeling that if plaintiffs are willing to give up 40% of the award to their lawyer who’s to argue with that? Our legal system agrees with you in this (small suprise). (Similarly, much of the money spent on medical care goes to administrative costs, a current flaw in our health care system.)
Everyone pays for this. Physicians, nurses and hospitals have to pay for malpractice insurance and this expense ultimately gets passed on to patients, and we all end up eventually being patients. In a rational world, in both the health care delivery and medical-legal fields less money would be siphoned off by the “Middle man”. I don’t think that will happen in our lifetimes.
“Physicians do not think the current malpractice system is “unfair” because the plaintiff’s attorneys make a lot of money”
What exactly was the point of the post then?
” A lot of doctors, and others, do feel that one unfortunate aspect of the current system, which has nothing to do with “fairness”, is that a lot of the money involved goes to legal fees, and more of it should ideally go to the injured parties, but I know you disagree with this view”
Actually, I don’t. I wish that it were cheaper to handle these, and that insurers would pay meritorious cases quicker, and that the risk and cost to the person funding the case was less. All of those things would result in less cost to the patient. But I don’t see any proposals from your side to deal with that – just proposals to cap the recovery overall or limit what just one side can pay its lawyers. Your “reform” never seems to focus on the cost driver of your insurance company. So your “desires” aren’t really reflected in your “acts”.
“Our legal system agrees with you in this (small suprise).”
Actually, our SOCIETY agrees that private parties for the most part should be able to contract with other private parties for whatever they want. Do you disagree?
“Physicians, nurses and hospitals have to pay for malpractice insurance and this expense ultimately gets passed on to patients,”
No it doesn’t, because your payment model doesn’t allow for you to pass this cost on.
” In a rational world, in both the health care delivery and medical-legal fields less money would be siphoned off by the “Middle man”. I don’t think that will happen in our lifetimes.”
There will always be billing and processing departments, even in a rational world. That’s a fact of business. Why? Because it maximizes your income, as the professional, to spend your time doing the most high value thing, which isn’t billing the patient or setting appointments or answering the phone. Those are not “middle men” simply for the sake of being “middle men”.
Good Lord, Matt, malpractice premiums are overhead for doctors, hospitals and nurses. Where do you think the money to pay for overhead comes from – money trees? The administrative costs of health care in this country exceed 30% of the medical dollar. This is twice the cost in most nations. This additional expense benefits no one except the administrators and is an estimated 210 billion a year that is wasted (not my term – see the editorial in the American Journal of medicine of in April). Most of us think this is excessive, just as most of us think that having more than 50% of the money involved in malpractive actions wind up in the pockets of lawyers is excessive.
Sad to see you are still focusing on caps after discussions ad nauseum about this.
The money comes at least half from the government. From the way you guys tell it that’s not much of a negotiation. And you’ve also told me health insurers, who supply much of the rest of the funds, base their rates on the govt. So I don’t think you go to them and say “hey my malpractice insurance is up 10% will you raise your reimbursement?”
As to what’s excessive if you think sp why don’t you encourage your insurer to pay sooner? Problem solved. But if you really want society to start regularly deciding whose pay is and is not excessive you may get your wish. Although I bet your profession won’t like the result.
I’m not focused on caps other than to point out the glaring difference in your professed concern for the injured as opposed to the actions taken. Your words are wonderful though. I agree completely.
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