Primary Care Category Archives — Page 2 of 67 — 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 6, 2020

Maryland adds testing and leads area in allowing nursing homes to re-open

by Patrick A. Malone

Maryland will take the lead among states in the area in re-opening nursing homes and other long-term care facilities from months of coronavirus-related closures to family members, guests, and other visitors.

Gov. Larry Hogan (shown, right) acted as the state, for the first time in months, reported that October started with zero Covid-19 fatalities and 76 of Maryland’s 227 nursing homes had active coronavirus cases — down from 130 on Aug. 5, the Washington Post reported.

After struggling through some of the worst outbreaks in long-term facilities in the area, Maryland will put significant resources into safeguarding nursing homes as they reopen, Hogan said.

October 5, 2020

McConnell push for immunity from lawsuits would protect big insurers, not small businesses

by Patrick A. Malone

Taxpayers have put billions of dollars into long-term care rescue. Congress and the White House have deadlocked over further assistance, with a key stumbling block — as expressed by the foot-dragging Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — focused on demands for greater protections for health care workers and enterprises, as well as business in general, from legal accountability for their work during the pandemic.

This is sham reasoning to stall desperately needed aid, for example, for schools and the jobless.

Small businesses, including the mom-and-pop long-term care facilities, put a demonstrably low priority on needing protection from liability lawsuits, according to a new study by Emily Gottlieb and Joanne Doroshow at the Center for Justice and Democracy at New York Law School. The researchers based their findings of multiple surveys of small business operators, with many of those questions posed by business groups themselves.

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:

October 2, 2020

In the midst of a crisis, Trump administration throws billions at giveaways to favored political targets

by Patrick A. Malone

Taxpayers and lawmakers have ensured that the federal Health and Human Services agency operates with roughly $2 trillion in discretionary and mandatory funding. This means the agency can employ about 80,000 staffers, many of them top experts in medical science, health care policy, and public health.

This concentration of expertise and experience, however, may mean less than ever.

That’s because just one man, and his hand-picked few, insist that they hold the absolute power to make life and death decisions for more than 330 million Americans, especially when it comes to health care and government spending on it.

September 30, 2020

For stressed-out patients, yet more and tougher warnings about ‘benzos’

by Patrick A. Malone

Signs abound that the coronavirus pandemic has really stressed out Americans. Dentists say they are seeing a surge in patients needing care for jaw-clenching and teeth grinding. Doctors report treating increased numbers of patients who have shed abnormal amounts of hair due to fear and anxiety about getting sick with Covid-19, losing a job as part of the disease’s economic shocks, or losing friends or loved ones to illness.

But there also is an increasingly worrisome way to deal with the mental health challenges of the coronavirus: prescription drugs, specifically the class of medications known as benzodiazepines. “Benzos,” as they commonly are known, are widely “prescribed for anxiety, insomnia, seizures, panic disorders and other health problems,” the New York Times reported.

“They are also often given before certain medical procedures. They slow brain activity, causing sedation or calming effects. The drugs are enormously popular. In 2019, according to the agency, roughly 92 million prescriptions for benzodiazepines — such as the highly prescribed Xanax, Klonopin and Ativan — were dispensed in the United States.”

September 29, 2020

Senate Democrats rip White House and GOP for inaction on nursing homes

by Patrick A. Malone

The White House and Senate Republicans have failed to protect more than 1.3 million Americans in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, with persistent inaction contributing to the rising toll of Covid-19 deaths and infections among the institutionalized — months after the crisis in long-term care exploded into the public consciousness.

Those are the new findings of Bob Casey and Ron Wyden, two ranking Democratic U.S. senators serving on the Aging and Finance committees, respectively. They issued their harsh criticisms and a minority staff report they requested and based on information from the Trump Administration. The Washington Post quoted Casey:

“This report lays bare the devastating cost that American families have paid as a result of the Trump administration’s incompetency and Republican inaction. The crisis in our nursing homes, which residents and workers and their families are experiencing every day, demands immediate action.”

September 25, 2020

Nursing homes’ continuing crisis inflicts big toll on residents with dementia

by Patrick A. Malone

Even as news organizations reported that the coronavirus pandemic has taken a grievous toll on seniors institutionalized with dementia, a presidential panel on nursing home care split over common sense but limp recommendations on how the nation might reduce Covid-19’s savaging of the old, sick, and injured in long-term care facilities.

The unsurprising, 180-plus pages of recommendations from the Coronavirus Commission on Safety and Quality in Nursing Homes to the Trump Administration and specifically its long-term care facility watchdog Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) included calls for: “More money for testing, for personal protective equipment (PPE), for registered nurses, for infection control training and staff salary increases,” the Washington Post reported.

Seema Verma, the CMS chief who has led a calamitous federal response in long-term care that has left at least 77,000 vulnerable residents dead — 40% of all the coronavirus fatalities in the nation — and not quite a half million infected, tried to spin the commission’s findings.

September 24, 2020

As D.C. Council considers more scooter laws, is it time to require helmets?

by Patrick A. Malone

Officials in the nation’s capital are working quietly to improve the regulation of e-scooters, aiming to ensure the trendy devices are available across the District of Columbia and don’t pose hazards to pedestrians, especially those with disabilities.

But is it also time for politicians to grapple with a rising safety issue: Is it time to require their riders to wear a helmet?

Doctors from the Mayo Clinic and the Emory School of Medicine recently published their findings about scooters, based on scrutiny of the latest data that is coming from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. They looked at cases from 2014 to 2019, especially those treated in emergency departments (EDs) and reported:

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.