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After Senator Baucus and his Democrat colleagues took a beating in the court of public opinion regarding all of their health care reform bills, they decided to change their strategy of openness to a veil of secrecy. This is the Senator’s way of responding to the public outcry against the placing our future health, safety and well-being in the hands of the denizens of Capitol Hill; write a new bill and don’t show it to anyone. Just take it to the floor for a vote after team Obama works on throwing the “blue dogs” a few bones.
However, as we have come to expect, the best kept secrets of the D.C. politicians always wind up on the six O’clock News. Baucus’ new secret health care reform bill is no exception. The conservative pundits on Fox News are telling us that Baucus eliminated the “public option” and set up the new bill so that we have to pay in advance for benefits that won’t kick in for at least two years. What happened to “we can’t afford to wait because people are dying?” Moreover, to the delight of the American Medical Association (AMA) leadership, the new proposals are focusing on coverage, leaving patient safety in the dust.
So now the debate rages on, focused entirely on universal health insurance coverage, how much we pay for premiums, and whether or not the government should get into the H.M.O. business. While there are some merits to making the insurance industry subject to the anti-trust laws to end 50 years of collusion in price gouging and arbitrary denials, the issues of health insurance are irrelevant. With the state of health care delivery being the fifth leading cause of death in the United States at 200,000 per year, with three times as many catastrophic injuries, Obama is not doing us any favors with universal coverage. As far as whether the government or the private insurance industry should manage our health care, I am in a quandary because they both suck!!!
As for the Republicans, they should stop attacking the only means that victims have for getting a little justice against hospitals, nursing homes, doctors and nurses who continue to regularly commit wanton acts of gross negligence and neglect to the point that it often becomes abusive.
Therefore, the real change we need is for Congress to take a look at the method of health care delivery and impose some patient safety standards. We need a special committee to look at hospital mistakes for starters, with experts who can present evidence and call in some hospital administrators in for questioning.
Here are a few of the questions that such congressional committee members should ask during the probative hearings:
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At the time that you set up your nurse-staffing schedule two months in advance and you realized that you would not have enough nurses to provide safe care, what action do you take?
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Do you notify patients and family members when you have an unsafe nurse staffing level on any given shift?
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What is the average nurse-to-patient ratio in your intensive care units?
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What is your average response time to the patient call light?
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Do your nurses provide fall risk assessment for every new patient?
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What percentage of your medical equipment is in disrepair?
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Do your nurses check patients for skin integrity every shift?
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Do you provide a pressure ulcer risk assessment on every new patient?
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Do maintain an operating staff on the premises 24 hours per day, 7 days per week for emergency surgery?
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What is the average waiting time in your emergency department for a patient to see a doctor?
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Do you monitor compliance with hand washing protocols among your personnel by taking random hand swabs daily?
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Do you monitor hospital acquired infections and investigate the source in all cases?
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Do your nurses turn immobilized patients every two hours without fail and document each position?
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What steps do your people take to insure against foreign body retention after surgery?
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What steps do your people take to insure against wrong surgical procedure or operating on the wrong body part?
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What steps do your management people take to make certain that life-saving equipment is in good working order at all times?
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What safety measures do you have in place to prevent medication errors?
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How does your institution deal with polypharmacy issues?
Additionally, the members of the bipartisan Congressional Committee on Patient Safety in the “United States of Utopia” can also access reports filed on http://medicare.gov on the nursing home compare and hospital compare pages to call in the worst offenders who continue to receive citations for Public Health Code violations in their respective states and who fair the worst with the quality indicators. They can also go to http://www.leapfroggroup.org/ to find out what we need in terms of legislation for patient safety.
In conclusion, Obama the members of his rubber stamp Congress need to get serious about public safety and stop the mass killing and injuring. Making health care safer will substantially reduce the number of law suits and the higher costs associated with defensive medicine. Therefore, Mr. President, if you make patient safety your first priority and remove the license to commit robbery from the insurance companies, then maybe you will have accomplished the change we need. You see, the actions that I speak of are neither left wing nor conservative; it just common sense to identify an obvious problem and fix it. Unfortunately, in the world of politics, if certain actions don’t fit right or left and serve to feed the pigs at the trough, no one will even mention that the problem exists.
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1 Posts about Barack Obama as of October 16, 2009 » The Daily Parr // Oct 16, 2009 at 6:02 pm
[…] video software and cameras and memories , yes? Does he really think that we haven’t noticed The Story of Health Care Reform in 2009: The Veil of Secrecy – legalnurseconsultanttom.com 10/16/2009 […]
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