(Snippets from the frontline)
Fear the ICU
A Medicare fact:
When you are admitted to a hospital, they are payed a flat fee no matter how sick you are or how long you stay.
If your admission is to the Intensive Care Unit with a life-threatening illness (like bleeding, infection, stroke, heart attack, or kidney failure), the hospital is still payed a single fee.
Since the hospital has to assume the costs beyond the flat fee, you then become a financial threat making you a target.
Upon ICU admission, your paperwork is checked for a designated Power of Attorney to make medical decisions should you be mentally incapable. If there is no paperwork, hospitals get their legal team to argue with your family over the direction of your medical care.
Some paid employees of the hospital including nurses, social workers, case management, HMO doctors, and hospitalists enter the picture painting a cloud of “pain and suffering”, “loss of quality of life”, “nothing more we can do”, or “futile care.”
That’s when “hospice” (end-of-life) is recommended.
Be aware: Should you feel this pressure in the ICU, the medical care of your loved one may be superseded by the financial interest of the hospital.
Gene Uzawa Dorio, M.D.
The “one price fits all” approach you describe places an ethical burden on our society. What is the legal basis for this scheme? The ethical basis?
1. Publish a list of hospitals which do this. Be sure to have legal proof before publishing, for obvious reasons.
2. Then, rank “teaching hospitals” accordingly each year so applicants to medical school can compare hospitals ‘ ethics: What are they teaching?
3. Contact Dr. Karen Summar in the office of Senator Charles Grassley.
He cited a Missouri hospital for taking the federal tax-exemption and still suing indigent patients.
H.E.Butler III M.D., F.A.C.S.