Hearst Newspapers Investigation Of Medical Malpractice

Joanne Doroshow has been telling us about it for years. If you care about health care I hope that you join the Center For Justice & Democracy (CJ&D). Doroshow is an American hero.

Also praise Honolulu KITV NEWS. KITV has courageously run the story DEAD BY MISTAKE this week in Honolulu. Kudos to KITV for all residents of Hawaii! No other television news in Hawaii covered this shocking story. Go figure! Money runs news media like KHON and the Fox News crew. Pravda American style. Only KITV stands above those members of major media.

Medical errors are an epidemic that is killing Americans at unprecedented levels. Doctors talk about lawsuit abuse aided by Big Insurance while Americans die. Dose anyone care? I know who cares. 100,000 American families who lost a loved one to incompetent doctors this year. But they do not have the money that insurance companies have and they don’t matter to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or the radical right who only care about money.

A fully loaded jumbo jet crashing every week with no survivors. That is American health care. Welcome to America. And who are those people screaming about socialism at the single payer town hall meetings? Are they citizens? Yes. Why are they there? Let me introduce you to the perfect storm: the radical right and Big Insurance.

The plot behind this conspiracy against public knowledge and the power of money is the too often sad story.

The History Of Tort Reform – A Story of Corporate Greed And A Conspiracy Against Justice For The People

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h85j1vNxd8A

Boeing works hard so that their airplanes don’t crash …… every week. Why do we allow doctors to go home to their estates up on the hills above our cities every night without being accountable like airplane manufacturers? Boeing has thousands of engineers with Ph D’s. A PhD is a far shot harder to get and requires a lot more brains than what it takes to get an M.D.

The errors are preventable. So why aren’t doctors gathering in conference rooms to study the causes and eliminate the errors? Why are doctors spending every waking hour in the smoke filled rooms of their lobbyists, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Medical Association, begging to be excused from medical errors that hurt patients? The world of health care is upside down.

Do you care? Of course you do.

Do you know? Of course not.

Major news media wouldn’t want to irritate those insurance companies that run high priced spots on local news 24/7 and 365 days a year. Say it ain’t so? Its so. Money rules the world. Doctors have it. Patients don’t. Insurance companies have it. People don’t.

Oh and let me clear the air at the outset. The American Medical Association is not a resource for the science of medicine and truth. It is a political organization tightly tied to the insurance industry. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has nothing to do with the Honolulu Chamber of Commerce. I love the Honolulu Chamber of Commerce. I am a small business and they help me survive. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is about as good for small business in America as Bernie Madoff was for investors. They lobby for the radical right wing agenda of Wall Street and Big Insurance.

Richard Flagg drowned in his own blood.

Stanley Stinnett choked on his own vomit.

Both were victims of the leading cause of accidental death in America—mistakes made in medical care.

Experts estimate that a staggering 98,000 people die from preventable medical errors each year. More Americans die each month of preventable medical injuries than died in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”

So begins the most comprehensive and compelling national investigative series about medical malpractice that any news organization may ever have produced. The series, Dead by Mistake, was generated by ” a team of skilled and dedicated journalists from across Hearst newspapers and television stations,” in conjunction with “an entire class of graduate journalism students at Columbia University,” that “read thousands of pages of documents, disciplinary files, lawsuits, governmental, medical and other public and private reports.”

It appears prominently in a number of Hearst’s publications, but you can catch the entire collection of stories here. The site includes in-depth statistical analysis, victims’ stories, slide shows, video, state-by-state analysis of "adverse event" reporting policies, and much, much more. Suffice it to say, it is a phenomenal source of solid information and its release couldn’t be have been more timely as Congress and the Administration grapple with medical liability issues in the health care bill.

Hearst’s investigative series is literally so sprawling there’s no way we can do it justice here—but as the report makes clear, medical malpractice is a nationwide epidemic—one that effects patients of every state, age, and income level. In just the last ten years alone, some “2 million Americans have died needlessly of preventable medical mistakes.” And those numbers are on the rise.

Needless to say, any fair reading of this report makes it clear: the problem with medical malpractice isn’t lawsuits—it’s the amount of medical malpractice itself. And this is no time to further insulate negligent health care providers from liability (especially since limiting patients’ rights will barely make a dent in overall health care expenditures).

Ironically, one person who knew that well was the aforementioned Richard Flagg. Richard was not just a malpractice victim. He was a tireless advocate for patients’ rights. Before his eventual death due to medical malpractice, Richard traveled twice to Washington, D.C. with the Center for Justice & Democracy, struggling to breathe, to ensure that the legal rights of patients were not limited with “caps” and other so-called “tort reforms.” His and others’ powerful messages ensured that Congress and the Bush Administration did not take away patients’ rights that year. Let’s hope his death was not in vain this year.