HILLARY CLINTON ONCE AIMED TO SAVE AN OBSCENE AMOUNT OF MONEY BY JUST STANDARDIZING THE FORMS USED IN THE PRESENT HEALTH CARE SYSTEM. SHE MET WITH HUGE RESISTANCE FROM THE HMOS, THOSE ORGANIZATIONS THAT ARE SO GENEROUS WITH THEIR CAMPAIGN CASH FOR CANDIDATES.
It’s nice to think that one day in the near future, each and every person in the United States will have access to affordable facilities and sufficient medical attention. It’s also nice to think that one day we’ll eradicate poverty, hunger, and the general ill will we foster towards one another on our daily commutes to work. Call me cynical, but that’s just how impossible I think that creating a nurturing, efficient, and all-encompassing healthcare system will be. In my 22 years of brushes with the system, I have encountered enough slip-ups to realize that you don’t have to be uninsured to be invisible. You only have to turn on the news to hear about the countless fatalities that have been caused by healthcare-related negligence.
43-year-old Edith Isabel Rodriguez died of a perforated bowel as she was being arrested for parole violation. The kicker? Up until the arrest, she was vomiting blood and writhing in pain in the waiting room of a Los Angeles Hospital. While hospital staff stood watching, her boyfriend desperately tried to seek attention for her and eventually resorted to calling 911. As ridiculous as that sounds, the story gets worse. Operators refused to address the issue because the couple was already at a hospital, thus deeming the situation a non-emergency. A female bystander also placed a call to 911 to plead for help to no avail. Eventually, hospital staff alerted security to the nuisance that Rodriguez was causing and found a small charge with which to arrest her. She died as police wheeled her out of the hospital.
Indifference among hospital staff was also involved in the death of the1950s songwriter Julius Dixson when he was admitted to a Manhattan hospital after breaking a bone in his hip. Did he die due to surgical errors? No. Rather, autopsies show that he died from dehydration and “metabolic complications.” In layman’s terms, Julius died of malnutrition. While it seems preposterous that somebody could die of such a preventable condition in a hospital, it is quite possible if certain staff members at that establishment happen to lose the dentures of that patient, thereby making it impossible for him to consume the solid foods presented to him at mealtimes. Nurses and doctors allegedly ignored the patient’s repeated complaints that he needed his dentures to eat. Two weeks after Julius was admitted, nurses finally inserted a feeding tube. By then, his body was too weak to process the nutrients, and he died a day later.
Fortunately or unfortunately, avoidable deaths within hospitals aren’t always caused by apathy. For instance a technical slip-up resulted in the blood thinner overdosage of six premature babies at Methodist Hospital in Indiana. Three of those six babies died. After a pharmacist accidentally stocked a medicine cabinet in the neonatal ward with adult-appropriate prescriptions, a nurse mistook them for children’s medicine, and the rest is self-explanatory. Needless to say, the deaths could have been easily avoided if either person took a moment to read the labels or even notice that they were color-coded.
While the incidents described seem extreme and far between, they are not as unusual as you would think. One only has to glance at the daily newspaper to realize that hospitals are as fallible as the capable (or incapable) hands within them. Not to mention that even the most proficient worker will make the occasional misjudgment, especially when he or she has been overtaxed by ridiculously long shifts and limited by institutional budgeting and policies regarding insurance coverage. Yet, while humans are imperfect by nature, the mistakes they are susceptible to making bear infinitely more weight within a hospital than in almost any other environment. Forgivable or not, these occurrences reflect the overall state of our healthcare system, and all is not well.
The thought that something like what happened to Edith Isabel Rodriguez, Julius Dixson, or the parents of the six babies in Indiana could happen to you is startling, but probably too extreme to really hit home. Emergency situations aside, do you know that at this moment, you are probably being hoodwinked out of a few hundred dollars? Medicine, like any other business, thrives on customer care. That means they make money by knowing things that you don’t know, and, indirectly, by keeping you in the dark (much like the old car mechanic). Having close friends in the medical field and having spent some time working in it myself, I have come to learn that morality and professionalism are often at odds.
Case in point, a friend of mine once worked for a certain podiatrist in Brooklyn who often sent old specimens to the labs when he “couldn’t” obtain one from the patient. Why? To misrepresent the simpler procedures as complex operations so that he could over-bill the insurance companies. He also made a profit by charging clients hundreds of dollars for “customized” and “therapeutic” foot pads when he was really just taking standard shoe slip-ins and cutting parts out. The retail value of these “therapeutic” pads? About eight dollars, max. My friend has been trying to find a bureau to report him to ever since. Similarly, after working at a Manhattan clinic for a year, I discovered that podiatry isn’t the only business banking on your ignorance.
The morning-after pill, an emergency contraceptive that costs up-to-and-beyond 125 dollars at private clinics, is the equivalent to taking an extra few doses of birth control. As birth control prices range from free to about 50 dollars a month, you can save a pretty penny by opting for the latter choice. Of course, we weren’t supposed to mention anything about that. (I have to throw in a little disclaimer here. My knowledge of medicine = internet research + office gossip. So strap on a condom, slap on a patch, or do whatever you have to do. You know what I mean.) I’ve seen a dozen instances in which the patient’s personal and fiscal interest came last on the list of priorities in medical facilities (HIPAA what?). And that’s saying a lot, considering that I work at a magazine.
The point of all of this is simple. While these instances seem isolated and situation-specific, they paint a bigger picture. People are, after all, just people. They are subject to error, apathy, and are motivated by many of the same things that motivate us all in business (i.e., money, money, money). And the victims of these mistakes and lies are patients…insured patients. The question I pose now is: how can we even begin to focus on solving healthcare related problems on a national level (think HMOs and insurance premiums) when we can’t even treat the insured patient right? If we maintain the status quo of healthcare and then make that available to every single person in the country, can you imagine what the influx of thousands, possibly millions of new patients will do to the system? Unless we begin to draft doctors, nurses, and staff, and then pull new facilities out of our hats, the system will not be able to handle the amount of people who need to be cared for. In fact, I believe it will crumble before our very eyes or worse still, crumble while we keep our eyes tight shut!
* “primum non nocere” – first do no harm