Although we’ve addressed the difficulty of knowing the cost of medical care before the bill arrives, few recent stories have illustrated the problem as well as one widely covered last week, including by the New York Times. A hospital in Livingston, N.J., for one example, charged an average $70,712 to implant a cardiac pacemaker, while….
Continue ReadingArchives for May 2013
Half of Hepatitis C Patients Risk Dire Illness Through Incomplete Testing
It has been about a year since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that all members of the baby boomer generation get tested for hepatitis C to determine, as we wrote, if they harbor the virus, or if they’ve already been compromised by its presence. The hep C virus can cause liver….
Continue ReadingWisconsin Law Proposes to Keep Patients Less Informed
We’ve written about the wide range of state authority and competence in regulating medical practice, (for example, here and here.) Mostly, compromised patient safety occurs because of official acts of omission; rarely does a state appear to commit to compromising patient safety. But as reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and analyzed by Pop Tort,….
Continue ReadingMalpractice Payouts Don’t Drain Health-Care Resources
For years now, medical professional organizations and insurers have waged war on the legal system for redressing medical malpractice that harms patients. They claim that too often payouts are so large and frivolous that they force clinicians to practice “defensive medicine” in order not to get sued and that they deplete health-care resources. Not. As….
Continue ReadingCancer Specialists Protest Drug Costs
Last year, a group of doctors at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center refused to prescribe Zaltrap, a new colon cancer drug, because it was twice as expensive as another drug and was not demonstrably more effective. The drug’s manufacturer cut the price in half. A second drug protest last month, according to the New….
Continue ReadingMedical Director Gets Fired for Putting Patients First
In 2010, when he was hired as medical director of Bakersfield Family Medical Center (BFMC), a professional network, and then, a year later, at another, Communities Physician Network (CCPN), Dr. John S. McGee had a pristine, 20-year reputation in internal medicine. The physician networks are intermediaries among managed care plans. McGee did well with his….
Continue ReadingConsumer Group Calls for More Rigorous Medical Device Testing
The proliferation of lawsuits over adverse events associated with invasive medical devices including metal-on-metal hip implants and transvaginal surgical mesh speak to a recent call by Consumers Union to strengthen the testing requirements for high-risk implants. Consumers Union, as described by AboutLawsuits.com, is the lobbying arm of Consumer Reports. Last month, it sent a letter….
Continue ReadingPharmaceutical Company Sued—Again—for Paying Kickbacks
Manufacturing an excellent product and marketing it well should ensure commercial success. A new lawsuit suggests that it wasn’t for Big Pharma player Novartis AG-the company was charged last month with fraud, allegedly for paying kickbacks to pharmacies that switched transplant patients from a less expensive generic drug to to its brand name med, Myfortic…..
Continue ReadingMisdiagnosis Is the Most Common and Most Dangerous Medical Mistake
After reviewing 25 years’ worth of payouts for malpractice claims in the U.S., researchers determined that diagnostic errors represented the largest proportion of claims, the most serious patient harm and the highest total of penalty payouts. As reported by ScienceDaily.com, the researchers from Johns Hopkins Hospital found that diagnostic errors accounted for 28.6% of the….
Continue ReadingHospitals Profit from Their Mistakes
If no good deed goes unpunished, does it follow that no bad deed goes punished? It does, apparently, if you’re a hospital. As widely reported earlier this month, including by the New York Times, a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association [JAMA], says that errors committed by hospitals can be….
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