Hospitals Category Archives — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

January 15, 2021

Speeding, distraction, intoxication: Why U.S. roads turned so lethal in 2020

Motorists who didn’t make new year resolutions should sign on to some lifesaving, commonsense vows: They can pledge to slow down, focus on task more, and to halt the record road carnage that happened in 2020.

In the year just ended, Americans drove fewer miles than they had in recent years due to public health restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic and the virus-caused economic collapse. But drivers logged destructive results when they hit the road, the Wall Street Journal reported, noting:

“Historically, economic downturns have led to fewer vehicle miles traveled as well as lower rates of motor-vehicle deaths, but last year took a different turn. Nationally, vehicle miles traveled dropped an unprecedented 264.2 billion miles over the first half of 2020, a decline of 17% compared with the first half of 2019, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). In the same period, the agency estimated the number of fatalities shrank 2%, falling to 16,650 from 16,988 the previous year. But the rate of fatalities grew 18%, rising to 1.25 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, up from 1.06. In other words, an inordinate number of people died given how many fewer miles they traveled. It was the highest motor-vehicle fatality rate for that span of time in a dozen years.”

January 10, 2021

U.S. must take more honest shot at battling this pandemic

by Patrick A. Malone

As the nation recoils from the deadly insurrectionist attack on Congress and the United States Capitol, a direct line also must be drawn to the huge health harms that President Trump and his administration incited with a flood of falsehoods, relentless attacks on science and expertise, and the reckless politicization of public health.

This administration will leave office with the nation hurtling toward 400,000 coronavirus deaths and 22 million infections. The disease is unchecked. New cases and hospitalizations are breaking records by the instant. The situation is likely to worsen significantly before it improves, experts warn.

The best efforts to battle Covid-19 also — due to a shambolic and too often counter-factual federal response — must combat the misinformation, mistrust, and animus sown during a needlessly destructive presidential term.

January 7, 2021

Hospitals start to roll out newly required data on prices and confidential deals

by Patrick A. Malone

A lot of people in health care across the country are firing up their computers to dig into long-sought, confidential information from hospitals about their prices and deals they cut on them with an array of parties.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, the Trump Administration successfully battled with hospitals to get them to disclose previously secret pricing data, in the hopes that disclosing this key information will benefit the U.S. health care system, notably in curbing costs. Here’s why, as the newspaper reported:

“T]hose who pay for health-care premiums and medical bills — employers, workers and patients — were long in the dark about wide price differences among hospitals for the same service in the same city, according to research and efforts by large employer groups to compare prices. Hospital prices are under intense scrutiny as the sector consolidates and research points to price increases after mergers, but without the quality gains that hospitals often cite as rationale for the combinations.

January 3, 2021

Pandemic exposes how push for profits can imperil nursing home residents

by Patrick A. Malone

Nursing home owners and operators have pleaded “poor us” through a lethal 2020. But profit-seeking players in the industry clearly still see rapacious opportunity in long-term care facilities — with residents suffering the consequences.

NPR and the Washington Post both have dug into the results when investment groups or chains acquire and operate nursing homes, and, as the media organizations reported, resident care declined.

The newspaper focused one of its deep digs on long-term care on New Jersey-based Portopiccolo Group, and how it “buys troubled nursing homes and tries to make them profitable,” paying “hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire facilities in Maryland, Virginia and elsewhere,” with little federal, state, or local oversight of its acquisitions.

December 31, 2020

Auld Lang Syne’s melancholy? This go-around it may be a tragic, viral dirge

by Patrick A. Malone

As the nation closes out 2020 and months of a raging coronavirus pandemic, will old acquaintances be forgot and never brought to mind?

Covid-19, unchecked, has killed at least 330,000 Americans and almost 19 million of us have been infected with the disease.

Those numbers likely are underestimated. Based on still tallying “excess deaths” in this country — the higher than expected number of fatalities above the norm and likely due to the coronavirus, the truer toll from Covid-19 as of Dec. 16, likely exceeds 377,000.

December 27, 2020

Coronavirus vaccinations lag behind plan as experts track contagious variant

by Patrick A. Malone

Even as medical scientists have detected a new, potentially more contagious variant of the coronavirus that also may pose greater risks to children, the high hopes for a faultless roll-out of Covid-19 vaccines are getting tempered with unhappy doses of reality.

Roughly 1 million Americans have been vaccinated already, most with a product from Pfizer and some with a vaccine from Moderna.

That is good news to start. It may, however, also start to raise concerns about the plans to inoculate more than 300 million Americans, many with a two-shot vaccine. That’s because Trump Administration officials had forecast with great confidence in recent days that 20 million Americans would be vaccinated before 2020’s end.

December 21, 2020

With virus toll grim and shots starting, knowledge about vaccines can be key

by Patrick A. Malone

The nation now has two potent vaccines to battle the coronavirus pandemic, and the federally approved Covid-19 vaccines are quickly getting into the arms of front-line health workers and vulnerable residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.

Experts have hailed the speedy arrival of clinically tested vaccines as a turning point in the world’s response to the novel coronavirus.

But will the vaccine roll-out be fast enough and accepted by enough Americans to halt Covid-19’s unchecked savaging of the nation?

December 16, 2020

Consultants apologize for opioid hype, as pharma payments take more fire

by Patrick A. Malone

Heaps of ignominy are not in short order for parties that played sketchy roles in fostering the nation’s deadly opioid abuse and drug overdose crisis. The stain has spread now to one of corporate America’s most-favored advisors — the giant McKinsey consulting group.

The firm has issued a rare public mea culpa for its work with Purdue Pharmaceuticals, a family-run drug maker that has gained notoriety, even among Big Pharma companies, for how it hyped its powerful painkiller OxyContin. The relentless push to sell that drug, officials have asserted, provided a ghastly template for peddling opioids, triggering abuse, addiction, debilitation, and death for hundreds of thousands of Americans in recent times.

Purdue was a McKinsey client, and the consultants now are re-examining their advice to the drug maker on how to fire up OxyContin sales and whether these suggestions fell short of the firm’s own standards. The New York Times, to its credit, dug into records to detail the consultants’ unacceptable conduct, reporting:

December 9, 2020

U.S. long hoped to reduce health spending. Now it’s happened, but it may not be good.

by Patrick A. Malone

The nation has gotten some long-desired, important health care economic news: The country has “bent the cost curve,” seeing 2020 as the first year in at least six decades in which America’s health care spending went down. But this may not be a good thing.

As Drew Altman, president and chief executive officer of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), reported of his organization’s economic data:

“Year-to-date spending on health services is down about 2% from last year. Health spending for the calendar year may end up lower than it was in 2019. Adding spending for drugs, which are less affected by Covid-19 and have not fallen, total health spending is still down by about 0.5% from last year. At its low point in April when the pandemic first really hit, spending on health services had fallen an eye popping 32% on an annualized basis. This is the first time expenditures for patient care have fallen year-over-year since data became available in the 1960s. The largest drop-offs were in outpatient care as people put off elective services or [visits to] doctors’ offices and outpatient clinics shut down. Telehealth visits increased dramatically but did not make up all of the difference.”

December 8, 2020

U.S. drug policy and treatment is shifting, even as opioid crisis surges

by Patrick A. Malone

Drug policy and treatment in this country is shifting in notable ways, even as the nation wrangles with a resurgent crisis in opioid abuse and overdose deaths and awaits a political transition that will determine a new response to drug harms.

As an indicator of the changing views on illicit substances, consider that the U.S. House has just approved “sweeping legislation that would decriminalize marijuana and expunge nonviolent marijuana-related convictions,” the New York Times reported. The newspaper said this of the bill, which for now also faces certain failure:

“The 228-164 vote to approve the measure was bipartisan, and it was the first time either chamber of Congress had ever endorsed the legalization of cannabis. The bill would remove the drug from the Controlled Substances Act and authorize a 5% tax on marijuana that would fund community and small business grant programs to help those most impacted by the criminalization of marijuana. The legislation is, for now, almost certainly doomed in the Republican-led Senate, where that party’s leaders have derided it as a superficial distraction from the work of passing coronavirus relief, as lawmakers inched toward bipartisan compromise after spending months locked in an impasse.