Governor Rick Scott’s state government is covering up the incidences of the death rates of newborn babies at Tenet run hospitals. It absolutely has nothing to do with the thousands of dollars that Tenet contributes to Republican campaign coffers.
Tenet is a for-profit hospital system, and they got in a lot of trouble (which included a “60 Minutes” report for doing large numbers of unnecessary open-heart surgeries.
This does not surprise me at all. :mad:
p.s. I used to work at a hospital where we had an open-heart surgeon who was making patients crash so he could resuscitate them. Administration looked the other way, because this brought so much money into the facility, until word got out about him in the community. So, he was run out of town and foisted on another community.
:mad: Who does he think he is, a priest?!
No kidding.
We had evidence a mile thick on this guy that should have led to the revocation of his license and possibly some jail time - but no, he crosses state lines where he can AFAIK inflict his own brand of carnage there instead. And it’s not like this hospital didn’t have experience with this kind of thing; a medical serial killer practiced there for a while :eek: although he’s not known to have killed anyone there. He did, however, go to prison for poisoning co-workers.
As to the alleged “Florida state government coverup” and the claim in the dailykos article about “standards” being eliminated by the state, I’m having difficulty understanding what this refers to.
According to information linked in the dailykos article, it appears that the state conducted an inspection of the hospital under contract with CMS (the federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services).
I was unaware that Florida or any state has the power to eliminate federal hospital inspection standards. Is there a better source of information on this?
It’s not a federal inspection standard. It’s a state reporting requirement, Fla. Admin. Code R. 59C-1.013, which is related to the issuance and maintenance of Certificates of Need (which are effectively licenses to build new hospitals or wards in the state). Part of the CON reporting is the number of Medicaid cases handled per year, but that is a purely state-directed requirement. The DKos article is really, really awful; “CMS” here refers to the state’s Children’s Medical Services program rather than the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid.
The administrative rule that was actually repealed is F.A.C. 64C-4.003, which is the one that required the hospitals performing pediatric cardiac surgery to not kill too many patients. You might find this administrative order better explains the situation (it’s a challenge by the parents of some of the St. Mary’s victims to the repeal).
AHCA has been highly politicized during the Scott administration, which isn’t really surprising since his prior experience was as a healthcare executive. So while I don’t know if Tenet got a quid pro quo here I would not be surprised at all.
This should surprise no one who knows anything about §Rick Scott’s past actions as CEO of Columbia/HCA. The man is a felon, and in a just world would be in prison, not governor of a state.
I know that it is a coincidence that he’s a sociopath and has the bug-eyed look of someone who is totally insane. I know that, in the rational part of my brain.
But good god is it creepy as hell, and I keep linking his insane death stare with his political and business dealings.
edit- just do a google image search for “rick scott”. No qualifiers, adjectives, anything.
In each and *every *one of those images, he will frighten you. It’s not one bad picture taken at an inopportune moment.
He looks like Hillary Clinton’s eyes look when she’s putting on her campaign rally face. It’s genuinely creepy from the both of them.
He does look creepy. Maybe it is because it looks like he has no eyebrows. He has sort of a Slender Man vibe.
“God is in his Holy temple…”
Jon Stewart once called him “Grown-Up Bat Boy.”
Slender Man fucked a naked mole rat.
Good for him. Only pervs insist the mole rat keep her stockings on or something.
CNN - Heart doctors outraged Florida dumps hospital standards after big gifts to GOP
ARS Technica Florida ditches surgical standards after failing hospital donates to GOP
Those articles are dated January 14, 2016.
I just checked and was relieved to see no Tenet owned hospitals near me. If they’re that bad in Florida, I wouldn’t trust them anywhere.
Only $100K to buy a governor of a large state? It took Israel over $1,000,000 to buy some GOP House members.
Thanks for clarifying the situation.
About as repellent as the state action in discarding the standards is the reasoning of the judge denying a challenge to the repeal.
Gee, I guess because people are inherently good we should repeal all the laws on the books, because it’s silly and insulting to have government mandate human behavior. :smack:
Behind this whole uproar is something that applies to surgery in general. It is an excellent idea to get it performed (especially complex procedures) at a facility that does a high volume of such surgeries. Even if a hospital is starting to provide a type of surgery by bringing in a couple of surgeons with good pedigrees and training, it doesn’t guarantee that the rest of the medical team is immediately going to be up to the task of providing the needed support.
That only applies to gun laws. :o
That’s a little unfair. The judge was essentially required to determine if the standards were absolutely necessary because of the standing analysis.
ALJs have very, very limited jurisdiction because they are not “constitutional courts”; they’re part of the executive branch.
first good laugh of 2016,:eek:
must be cabin fever or “snow days” piling up here
I googled it.
Infinity hits.