Wow, finally! Huge thanks, BigT! Even though you couldn’t answer my two main questions, I’m greatly indebted to you for your otherwise perfectly on point and very valuable reply. I’m delighted you recognized the key points here!
Yesterday (Tuesday), I made an appointment with what I dearly hope to be my new, very well-educated, compassion-award-winning doctor (it’s a meet and greet so that I can be assured she doesn’t have any reluctance to care for me in advance), but she’s out of town for the next ten days or so.
As far as getting refills, I haven’t solved that yet but I’m considering asking my kidney specialist (my family too easily forms stones), with whom I have an excellent relationship, if he would be willing to do so until I have a new primary-care doctor. If not, then I’ll try the urgent care/hospital as suggested earlier.
But again, thank you for recognizing the truly egregious ethical and legal violations in this situation! I think my next step will be to visit one of those online “ask a lawyer” sites. You pose your question, then one or another attorney emails you, giving a price (much lower than what a sit-down appointment would cost) for answering your question, after which you can optionally pursue the situation further.
I very much hope I haven’t angered or offended you! Truly, I am very grateful for your replies. Please be assured of that – you’re clearly one sharp person!
I’ve addressed that issue several times now. I specifically told the doctor in my fax that I would completely understand if he did not have room for me, yet he never offered that as an explanation, only that I “needed to see a specialist”, which is bullshit.
That’s definitely not true. If you’re interested, see the links I provided here, where you’ll see that it is indeed illegal to abandon a patient in the way he did in my case, and malpractice lawyers issue dire warnings against what he did.
Neither. As I explained elsewhere, I wish to pursue legal action – just short of a lawsuit – against the doctor and the practice for their quite illegal “patient abandonment”, particularly in refusing to refill my vitally necessary regular medications. I posted my OP to General Questions in order to try to get answers to two straightforward General Questions (highlighted in blue, above) that, if I actually knew the answers, would help me determine whether the law was unequivocally violated or not.
I didn’t expect everyone to know the answers (though boytyperanma’s juvenile, wrong-headed, and contemptible reply is bullshit in every respect, because I am NOT asking for “legal advice”, only the answers to two General Questions that apply not just to me but to anyone throughout the U.S.), but I was hoping someone might know. But it’s perfectly fine that you don’t happen to know, so no worries.
Thank you, but what you say contradicts what is reported in the links I’ve provided. Perhaps you aren’t adequately familiar with the laws in this regard. It is indeed quite illegal to abandon a patient in the way I was. Whether I could win a lawsuit based on the limited damages I have suffered as a result is certainly very doubtful, but a lawsuit is far from the only legal remedy I have.
As for the letter being unsigned, every bit of information I can find definitively asserts that an unsigned letter is no letter at all. This matters very much indeed because, until I receive a signed, legally binding letter of termination, the 30-day period doesn’t even begin, let alone expire! Thus, the patient abandonment gets more and more harmful over time.
The pharmacy has sent several faxes to the office and made several follow-up phone calls, but no refills have been provided. My friend the pharmacist has pursued this as his mission, and is utterly outraged at their egregiously despicable behavior. There is no legal or ethical difference between “ignoring” refill requests and deliberately ensuring that my health suffers substantially.
I get that this is stressful for you, but not only was there nothing insulting in the post that you quoted but it was also very good advice.
Someone gave me similar advice once when a company laid me off for reasons I didn’t agree with. It became clear during discussions that they just didn’t want me around any more (it was a consultancy that I had been moved to in a group-wide reshuffle and the company’s focus wasn’t exactly my skill set) and whilst I scrambled to try and keep my job someone said to me “do you really want to work for someone that really doesn’t want to employ you?”
I’d remix that question for you. Do you really want a medical practice that doesn’t want you as a patient?
Honestly, moving elsewhere really sounds like the best option.
I don’t really see a lot of sense in making a big “mission” out of fighting back against this medical practice, when you could use that effort to seek out a doctor who you like and who also wants to see you. It just sounds like a lot of unnecessary stress for very, very little reward.
If you were bleeding out of all orifices then yes you could force them to see you and it would be monstrously evil if they didn’t see you. For routine refill requests, well, you can probably get in to see another provider who actually doesn’t hate you by the time you manage to “prove a point” to these people.
I don’t see what the practice did wrong, legally. You got two copies of the letter and spoke to the office manager, who confirmed exactly what the letters said. The fact that the letter is signed by the whole practice, in effect, I don’t believe is meaningful. The doctor who would have terminated you is dead, if I understand your OP. He cannot sign the letter, therefore, so the letter came from the whole practice. IANAL, but I doubt you have much of a case. Nor do I see what you want to accomplish with your “everything short of a lawsuit”.
If you did want to convince us, your posts to this thread, and your description of your actions, are not a good start.
I don’t think it matters. You got it via registered mail, and you told the office manager specifically that you received it. And again, I doubt that the letter being signed on behalf of the whole practice is going to make any difference.
I have no idea why you keep insisting this is illegal. I seems you want it so bad to be true that you’re confusing possible unethical with illegal. There isn’t a physician in this country that has to treat you for a routine follow up. They have discharged you. They have offered to treat you within the 30 days in the event of an emergency. The only problems regarding the prescription refills I can see is if the medications are something that 1. Could cause you withdrawal symptoms 2. You need them to remain healthy.
Spend your money on a lawyer site. They will tell you the exact same thing. There is no law against discharging a patient in no imminent danger whether the notification is an unsigned letter or carrier pigeon. Liability issues, perhaps if something happens to you, illegal, no.
You haven’t said what they are for. I could be wrong and maybe giving the doctor’s office a knee jerk benefit of the doubt but I suspect they are quality of life medication and not medically necessary.
Two pleases. One sincerely. A timetable for your information and a form that will assist in the smooth transfer of records. That doesn’t seem to be “termination with *extreme *prejudice!” to me.
No. It doesn’t state why they’re no longer treating you. Perhaps you already know. Or perhaps you will find out in the future. But then, with the above as an example of how facts get contorted in the retelling, I doubt that we the board will ever get the full story on this situation. It’s what they call in fiction the unreliable narrator.
Agreed. I went through your links, and other than the question about the prescriptions and how medically necessary they might be - and my husband’s own doctor will refuse to refill some prescriptions without another visit first - there does not appear to be any legal issue here as far as I can tell. Ethics, perhaps, but that’s hard to tell considering the limited information we have to go on.
They made every effort to inform you.
They gave you sufficient notice.
You are not being discharged during a critical phase in your healthcare.
Their practice is short one physician and may, upon further analysis by their doctors and staff, be unable to continue seeing non-critical patients from the deceased physician’s patient load.
Your particular case may be, for reasons not perceived/not disclosed by you, be unsuitable for care at their practice.
I may have missed this in the floods of posts by you - have you called the doctors’ office to inquire why your prescriptions have not been refilled? Assure them that you are out and that you only want a 30 day supply, with no extra refills, to tide you over.
And if you haven’t already, I must emphasize that you need to work fulltime on finding another doctor and getting a follow up appointment. Like, starting the day you were informed that you would no longer be seen by their practice. Most doctors will want to see you first before refilling any ongoing prescriptions, and it will almost certainly be difficult to be seen in time if you don’t move on this.
Finally, let me theoretically suggest alternative explanations.
It is theoretically possible that regardless of your medical conditions being “stable,” they determined that the physician in question really should have referred you to a specialist anyway. I have seen specialists at times for years for ongoing but stable medical problems.
It is theoretically possible that the remaining physicians and staff are a bunch of assholes who like to fire paying patients who have no issues with non-compliance, drug seeking, or behavioral/personality issues.
It is theoretically possible that the doctors and staff thought they could handle the old doctor’s workload but upon reassessing the situation, discovered they could not, and are referring out the more complex cases.
It is theoretically possible that your behavior or personality has been distressing enough to the staff that they are using this opportunity to offload you as a patient using a plausible reason (specialist) and that your old doctor was sufficiently tolerant/ignorant/dismissive of said behavior that he never confronted you about it, but the other doctors won’t tolerate it.
Using examples that surely have no possible bearing on your case: I’ve seen patients who were utterly dismissive assholes to techs but sweet as pie when the doctor was in the room. I’ve seen patients who don’t want a non-white tech doing their work-up but don’t explicitly mention the reason; they just “coincidentally” happen to like all the white techs and find some meaningless fault with every non-white one. I’ve heard about plenty of “dirty old men” who make just barely appropriate comments about the female tech’s looks and try to accidentally-on-purpose bump into/brush against them in not-quite sexual ways at each visit (I can think of maybe a couple times I’ve ever bumped into a female patient, or a polite male patient), to the point where the techs worry about escalation and will try to only enter the room with another staff member present.
More recently, we saw a case where the patient in question will swear up and down that one of our physicians didn’t listen to his concerns, was dismissive and just in a hurry to move on to the next patient, scheduled unnecessary procedures, etc. The reality of it was that he was abusive to the staff and physician, concealed that he required a particular medical treatment before his surgery and hadn’t had it done, resisted undergoing treatments to rectify the situation but expected to just be magically “better” and obviously his not being such was the fault of our doctor, and so on. I’m sure he feels he’s right and he knows best. That doesn’t fix the situation he’s in.
