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

October 6, 2020

Government indicts malpractice lawyer for allegedly trying to extort millions from Baltimore hospital

A Maryland attorney has been indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for an alleged scheme seeking a multi-million dollar payoff by the University of Maryland Medical System. Attorney Stephen Snyder is alleged by the government to have proposed a sham “consulting agreement” with the hospital, which would pay him $25 million, in order to keep secret some alleged facts about the hospital that he had learned in the course of representing a patient’s family.

Readers might wonder why our blog that focuses on patient safety and medical malpractice would write about this. Here’s why. We believe that attorneys who represent patients in medical malpractice lawsuits have an ethical duty to look out for the public’s interest, not just the narrow interests of themselves or even of their clients. That means that when a lawyer finds out in the course of representing someone that a hospital has a big patient safety problem, the lawyer should not try to personally profit from that knowledge by keeping quiet.

The Snyder indictment involves allegations about the organ transplant program at UMMS. (The building for the program is shown in the photo on the right.)

October 4, 2020

Unchecked Covid-19 pandemic gives U.S. a new reason to hold its breath

by Patrick A. Malone

Falsehoods, even when loudly repeated, do not magically become true. The Covid-19 pandemic rages across the United States, and the facts do not support in any way the myth that the nation is “rounding a corner” in seeing the disease diminish its destructive course or magically disappearing.

The toll of the coronavirus is ripping toward 210,000 deaths and more than 7.3 million infections, with those figures likely understated.

As the Washington Post reported of its data analysis:

September 22, 2020

Here are 7 big reasons why Americans should worry a lot about health care

by Patrick A. Malone

Americans have made health care a central concern of the upcoming elections with excellent reasons. Their nightmares about this issue are getting worse, not better:

Medical debt, one of the disgraces of the world’s most expensive health care in the planet’s wealthiest nations, has spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic. A consumer finance firm recently found that its 22 million members carry $45 billion in bills owed to providers and in collections. With the coronavirus also staggering the economy, bankrupting medical debt is only likely to skyrocket as the nation’s 30 million jobless exhaust their finances and lose health insurance from their work.
Health insurance offers one of the few widely available means for ordinary folks to try to protect themselves and their loved ones from seeing their finances destroyed by illness or injury. But new U.S. Census data, describing a time before the pandemic, shows that “the first three years of President Trump’s tenure were a period of contracting health insurance coverage,” the Washington Post reported. “The decreases reversed gains that began near the end of the Great Recession and accelerated during early years of expanded access to health plans and Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act — the sprawling law that was a signature domestic achievement of President Barack Obama and has been derided by Republicans, including Trump, ever since.” Just under 30 million Americans were uninsured — 1 in 10 of us, with the numbers rising by several million over the last several years of the Trump term.

September 3, 2020

With conventions over, who will support or tear down crucial health supports?

by Patrick A. Malone

Health care persists as one of the top concerns for voters as they consider candidates this fall — not just for the presidency but up and down the ballot.

A lot got said at the political conventions in the last two weeks on the topic, and, to their credit, media organizations have engaged in fact-checking and myth-busting about health-related topics.

But beyond the crafted speeches over four nights for each party and looming past the repeated talking points of the candidates and their hand-picked supporters, voters will confront issues of huge gravity — some well known and others maybe less so.

August 26, 2020

Ethics clarity would benefit D.C. deal for new hospitals for underserved wards

by Patrick A. Malone

The City Council in the nation’s capital soon will delve into more details and give crucial approvals to a positive-seeming agreement to provide under-served areas of the District of Columbia with not one but two new hospitals. This deal could be improved quickly, however, if leaders also resolve what has become a prickly revolving door issue for a top city official.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser this month asked the district’s Board of Ethics and Government Accountability to weigh in on D.C. Administrator Rashad M. Young’s abrupt decision to leave his top-level role in city government to join Howard University as its senior official for “future, strategic planning.”

Young, former city manager in Alexandria, created potential issues for Bowser and her administration because he was one of her longest-serving, most trusted, and empowered chiefs. He ran the city day-to-day for Bowser and the dcist news site reported this of him:

August 23, 2020

Are kids wrong in describing the pandemic school chaos as a ‘cluster …’ ?

by Patrick A. Malone

If the young are the nation’s future, they are getting a sorry eyeful now of how not to deal with widespread death and disease, uncertainty, and inequity. What will kids say years from now about how parents and politicians handled young folks’ schooling during the Covid-19 pandemic?

The student journalists at the University of North Carolina (photo, right) captured in one vulgar term the shambolic response, labeling it a “cluster—” you-know-what.

That reaction summarized the anger and frustration as leading institutions of higher education, including UNC and Notre Dame re-opened, got thousands of young people sort of settled in, and then abruptly shut down, sending them packing and switching to online learning. The universities did so after coronavirus cases on campus exploded.

August 16, 2020

With as many as 200,000 U.S. dead already, grimmer days may still be ahead

by Patrick A. Malone

The Covid-19 pandemic, with grim outcomes already, may get even worse in the days ahead.

That troubling forecast — from one of the nation’s less-than-outspoken medical leaders (Dr. Robert Redfield, right, head of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and as laid out in a seasoned journalist’s detailed reporting — may seem hard to take for already coronavirus-fatigued Americans.

The warnings, however, come atop even more alarms about the disease’s unchecked spread and the hard-to-fathom responses to it.

August 12, 2020

Missouri the latest state to show big backing for Medicaid and Obamacare

by Patrick A. Malone

Voters keep sending Republicans — in statehouses, Congress, and the White House — a clear message: Americans want affordable, accessible health insurance, most notably as offered under the GOP-loathed Affordable Care Act, and especially for the poor and working poor via Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid.

This issue, if anything, may be rising in importance to the U.S. electorate as the Covid-19 pandemic rages without check and millions of Americans wrestle with pervasive joblessness that wiped out many people’s health insurance coverage.

Just weeks after voters in red Oklahoma backed a state constitutional amendment to expand Medicaid and narrowly defied the opposition of powerful GOP politicians who have dominated their state, residents of the “Show Me” state of Missouri showed up in force to approve Missouri’s expansion of the program coverage, by a 53% to 47% margin.

August 4, 2020

VA ripped for ER abuse of suicidal vet and ‘Covid cocktail’ at state homes

by Patrick A. Malone

Veterans Affairs officials are taking yet more fire over medical services provided at the sprawling agency’s facilities:

An internal watchdog ripped a Washington, D.C., VA emergency room for abusing and sending away a mentally troubled patient who then killed himself.
And House members demanded to know why institutionalized and elderly vets were treated for Covid-19 with an antimalarial drug promoted without evidence by President Trump.

August 2, 2020

With Covid-19 surge unchecked, testing, tracing, and key data teetering, too

by Patrick A. Malone

How big and bad is the now-unchecked Covid-19 pandemic and the damage it is inflicting on this country?

The United States persists as the novel coronavirus epicenter, blowing past previous record numbers of infections to more than 4.5 million. The disease has edged toward claiming the lives of roughly 155,000 Americans. Imagine if the equivalent, the population of Alexandria, Va., died in just a few months.

July went in the books as the cruelest month, thus far, with Covid-19 infections doubling over June’s tallies, deaths surging, and the coronavirus surging or parking at a high and lethal plateau in most parts of the country,