Cancer is a terrible set of diseases. Some are relatively treatable, if detected in time, while others are aggressive and nearly always fatal. Medical malpractice does not cause cancer but medical malpractice can turn a treatable cancer into a death sentence.
The cancer cases that I see almost always involve the same issue: delay. There was a delay in discovering the cancer or a delay in recognizing the cancer, or a delay in beginning treatment. It is why people come to see me. In order for the delay to be the basis for a case that I can take and
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Going To The Emergency Department Can Be Hazardous To Your Health
This may come as a shock to you but there are a lot of mistakes made in the emergency department that kill and seriously injure people. If you do what I do for a living, you already know this. If you are just a regular member of the public, this may be big news to you. Importantly, this is not just me saying there is a lot of medical malpractice in the emergency department. This is the federal government talking after a review of what has happened in ER’s over the last twenty years.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and
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Health Care Professionals Are Not Immune to Greed
Willie Sutton, the Depression era bankrobber, when asked why he robbed banks, famously responded, “That’s where the money is.” Today, the money is in illegal drugs and the Medicare program. Foreign drug cartels make huge profits smuggling illegal drugs into the United States. Even larger amounts of money flow through the Medicare program. Health care professionals see these money flows and often cannot resist the urge to cash in. Here are some recent examples.
A long-time Philadelphia pharmacist has admitted committing a whole range of crimes relating to the distribution of oxycodone and fraud. In addition to filling prescriptions that
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“I Made A Mistake Which Injured You.”
This is not a statement a doctor is very likely to make, even though there is an ethical obligation to be honest with patients and to make sure medical records are accurate. Sadly, the way our system operates, there are strong incentives for doctors to keep quiet and strong disincentives for doctors to speak up. The fact that most malpractice is deliberately hidden has profound consequences for the health care system as a whole and for the patients who are the victims of malpractice.
There are very few good reasons for a doctor to admit to a mistake. There are
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Our Health Care Spending Subsidizes the Rest of the World
If you follow this blog or read much about health care spending, you know that we in the United States spend twice as much per person on health care as any other nation on earth. We pay way more for medicines than anyone else. Our doctors and hospitals make more than doctors and hospitals anywhere else in the world. Why can’t we get the same deals as the rest of the world when it comes to health care spending? It turns out that everyone else uses our high prices to save themselves money. Without our sky high spending, health care
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Just Fill Out These Forms – Hospital Edition.
If there was ever a situation of more uneven bargaining power than being asked to fill out hospital forms while lying on a gurney in the emergency department, I cannot think what it could be. And yet that is precisely when the hospital asks you to fill out pages and pages of forms with closely spaced legal mumbo jumbo that can have huge legal and economic consequences down the road. You are in no position to get up and leave. You are in no position to refuse to sign. So you do what you must; you sign, usually without even
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Our Broken Health Care Delivery System.
Next time you are visiting someone at the hospital and have a few minutes to spare, take a drive through the doctor’s parking lot. If you live in a major metropolitan area, you will see luxury car after luxury car. In areas more remote from the big cities, there will be nice cars, but probably not as many really expensive ones. What does this have to do with our broken health care delivery system? Well, pretty much everything.
In order to afford those fancy cars, doctors must make a lot of money and many of them do, particularly the specialists.
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Medical Malpractice and Quadriplegia.
Over the years, I have handled a number of cases in which the patient successfully underwent surgery only to become paralyzed in the hours and days after leaving the operating room. In each of these cases, the patient should not have been paralyzed. In each of these cases, the nurses or the surgeons or sometimes both of them failed to do their jobs and the patient was left with a lifetime of paraplegia or quadriplegia.
The spinal cord is like a superhighway through the body. Like a superhighway, it is a critical piece of infrastructure. It carries messages from the
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Some Helpful Medicare Enrollment Information.
It is only early November and I am already sick to death of the advertisements trying to get me to enroll in a Medicare Advantage plan and I still have a month go before the open enrollment period ends. Every celebrity in an advertisement these days tells me I need to get what I deserve. Grumpy Marge needs to be persuaded to call the number on the screen. These ad campaigns must be working as the number of Medicare eligible Americans enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans keeps increasing every year. As of 2022, almost half of the eligible Medicare beneficiaries
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BOO! It’s Halloween and the Scammers and Fraudsters Are Out.
Of course, the scammers and fraudsters are out every night. It pays to be careful so you don’t end up as one of their victims. Scammers are always refining their scams so you may see new tricks. Here are some of the things you can do to protect yourself.
If you didn’t initiate a conversation on line or on the phone, assume that the “person” on the other end is a scammer and act accordingly.
No matter how attractive you may think you are, handsome men and beautiful women are not sitting at their computers just waiting to fall in
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You’re Not Listening To Me.
Medical diagnosis and its evil twin, misdiagnosis, are profoundly influenced by the physician’s ability to effectively listen to the patient. There are great diagnosticians and some doctors who are not so great diagnosticians. The great ones almost always say the same thing, “If you listen to the patient, she will tell you all you need to know.”
There are many trends in medicine which discourage physicians from listening to their patients. Probably the most important of these is the press of time. Doctors are being pushed by economics to spend less time on each patient visit. The less time there
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Our Hospital Pricing System Is Insane.
I recently wrote a post about how our health insurance system is making the delivery of health care worse than it should be. Here is another horror story for your files.
There are two variables in health insurance plans that can greatly impact what you pay for medical care. They are the deductible and the co-pay. The deductible is the amount of medical bills that you must personally pay each year before your health insurance plan will even begin to pay. A plan with a low monthly premium but a large deductible may prove to be very expensive in the
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More Evidence Medicare Advantage Plans May Not Be A Good Deal
It is that time of the year again. The Medicare Annual Enrollment period runs from mid-October to early December. That means that the airwaves are full of celebrity spokespeople encouraging everyone who is Medicare eligible to “get all you deserve.” By that they mean that you should enroll in a Medicare Advantage Plan and get “more” benefits than traditional Medicare provides. It is true that most Medicare Advantage Plans offer benefits that Medicare does not and that they do not charge their members for those additional benefits. How can they afford to do that? The simple answer is that they
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Developments in Type 1 Diabetes.
Nine years in and counting. It has been nine years since my then 3 year old grandson was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. At the time of his diagnosis, I assured his anxious parents that relief was on the horizon. Medical science was working feverishly to find both a cure for Type 1 diabetes and mechanical treatments that would more closely replicate the natural processes of the pancreas and keep blood sugars in a normal range. While medical science continues to work feverishly on these two fronts, a really good solution seems still to be just out of reach.
Success
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Thanks to Health Insurance Health Care Is Getting Worse.
In the United States, we already pay more than any other developed nation for health care, but have poorer outcomes in major categories of care, such as infant mortality, life expectancy, obesity levels and rate of suicide, just to name a few. Of course, there is one significant difference between us and the rest of the developed world; we are the only ones without universal health care. This has two important consequences, which will continue to plague us and which will likely lead to a continuing decline in our quality of care. First, many of our citizens do not have
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Some Doctor Reviews Are Fake.
Studies show that consumers search for and rely on reviews for nearly everything, including medical care. We are all looking for that 5 star product or service. Couple this with a thriving black market in fake reviews and you have a real problem. Many sellers believe that it is a matter of life and death for them to have positive reviews and are willing to pay someone to provide them. Doctors are not immune to these temptations.
The problem of fake reviews of doctors, hospitals and other medical care providers is not new but it is getting worse. There is
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