Showing posts with label health care quality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label health care quality. Show all posts

Friday, September 18, 2009

Can Reform Help This Kind of Health Care?

I just a chilling article about two nurses in West Texas who anonymously reported to the Texas Medical Board a doctor in their hospital who was peddling his own herbal remedies to patients as well as neglecting his official duties and, basically, practicing bad medicine.

Seems the Good Doc, however, was in cahoots with the local sheriff in the herbal remedy racket. Said sheriff then swooped in, seized computers, found the nurses, charged them with crimes, got them fired, and now they're out on $5,000 baiil awaiting trial.

Herbal remedy sales are still booming throughout the ordeal, evidently.

However sad this sordid little tale is, what is even more shocking is how widespread deliberate malpractice is. Chew over this tidbit:
Medical professionals, especially nurses who are generally lower on the food chain, so to speak, are increasingly reticent to speak out when they see unsound, unethical or corrupt things going on in healthcare. It is hard to do the right thing. They know and see the consequences of following their consciences and the Code of Ethics. This is not an isolated incident. Three California nurses were suspended after they reported a doctor who later admitted giving a lethal injection to a child and another nurse was threatened with firing after refusing to follow a doctor’s verbal order to administer morphine until a patient stopped breathing.
When our health care system fires people who want to do good and right while it protects the evil-doing doctors, then we clearly need more than health care reform. We need to stay healthy enough so that we never have to go to a hospital. Here's to dying like Bing Crosby--falling over dead while playing golf on a course in Spain.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

AHRQ Proves that Cold Weather Cures...

...the health care system anyway.

In its just-released comparative study on health care quality in the 50 states, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) ranks most states as average, but those few that came in as strong seemed to be--from my unscientific review of the data--located in the northernmost midsection of our nation.

Specifically, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa were deemed as having "strong" quality health care. Massachusetts slipped into the category too, which of course will have liberals shouting that "See, health care reform [socialization] works!" (Actually, Massachusetts has always had an advanced health care system even before Commonwealth Care, which may well end up destroying it.)

It also appeared almost axiomatic that the bigger the state, the worse the health care. Also, Sunbelt States didn't pan out too well either.

I'm doomed.