It is easy to forget that most Maryland nursing homes were mom-and-pop shops. The beginning of the end was in 1965 when President Johnson successfully passed Medicare and Medicaid legislation which meant that governement would begin footing the bill for many nursing home residents. Like day follows night, so too did investor money.
There is no question that some of these mom-and-pop nursing homes were downright horror shows. Some of the abuse and neglect stories would make today's nursing home game seem too good to be true. But there was also a lot of great care when people, instead of corporations, were running the show.
Now, we have less nursing home atrocities but we have standardized marginal care. The first problem is the lack of human touch. If you live in my house, I realize the buck stops with me. In a nursing home, everyone passes the buck. This complacancy is coupled with a profit incenitve to provide the most expensive nursing home care possible at the lowest possible cost. With so many nursing homes taking Medicare, you can't increase revenues. So you can only increase cost.
These problems manifested themselves quickly. Here is a Baltimore Sun article from 1970 wherein Ralph Nadar is already sounding the alarm. Congress saw it, too, and enacted legislation in the late 60s and early 70s to combat the problem. But, not unlike 2011, the bills that got passed were watered down versions of what they should have been. So instead of focusing on residents' care, these bills mostly focused on facility maintenance. So nursing homes continued to run largely amok. Nursing home in Maryland complain the problem is nursing home lawyers which is really failing to meet Step 1 in the 12 step process. The actual reality is that nursing home lawsuits in Maryland - with exceptions to be sure - are a part of the solution, not the problem.
The
federal government is trying a different tactic now
and trying to push Medicare recipients away
from institutional
care and
towards home based care. One
government incentive program would likely require Maryland to raise its share of
Medicare
funding for long-term, non-institutional
care from 38 percent to 50 percent over the next few years.
Great idea. But in the short run, nursing homes are going to lose revenue. What are they likely to do? Cut costs. Which means even worse care for nursing home residents.
If you or someone you know is caught up in this mess and needs Maryland nursing home lawyer, call 800-553-8082 or get a free online consultation.
On October 7, 2011, Chuck Grassley wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Rockville, Maryland, stating that The National Practifioner Data Bank's (NPDB's) Public Use File (PUF) serves as "the backbone in providing transparency for bad acting healthcare practitioners" and explained that the data has been used for years by researchers and consumer groups to calculate trends in disciplinary action by state medical boards. His letter was in response to the removal of the database by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). The database was removed after a reporter was able to identify a physician's data bank record by comparing the de-identified information with state court records.
Chuck Grassley received a response to that letter, one that he called "incomplete, even while revealing that the HRSA prematurely jumped to conclusions regarding a reporter who used publicly available information to track down the identity of a doctor with a record of malpractice cases." Grassley stated that it looks like the HRSA was trying to protect a single physician who had a malpractice suit and disciplinary action filed against him, and in doing so, the federal government undermined its own mandate to "enhance the quality of healthcare, encourage greater efforts in professional peer review and restrict the ability of incompetent healthcare practitioners to relocate without discovery of previous substandard performance or unprofessional conduct."
Chuck Grassley has said that whoever made the decision to remove the database needs to be held accountable, and that the Public Use File in question should be fully restored on the HRSA website. "Department officials are misguided if they think they can make this issue go away with the response sent to my first letter of inquiry," Grassley said. "This database contains information intended for public consumption, and efforts to shutter access will be fought by those of us committed to transparency where public dollars and the public interest are at stake."
]]>Breast cancer malpractice lawsuits are common because of advances in modern technology: we can beat breast cancer in the vast majority of cases if we can catch it early. If breast cancer is detected on or before the Stage II, the 5-year survival rate is generally over 80 percent and even higher for otherwise healthy people.
Conversely, if breast cancer is not detected until it has reached stage III, the 5-year survival rate drops to roughly 54%. Even at Stage III, most woman are going to survive and thrive. In the minority of these Stage III cases with unsuccessful outcomes, tere are so challenges because of some problematic ruling by the Maryland high court in loss of chancer wrongful death cases.
The "best" cases - and it feels awful writing that - are Stage IV cases that should have been caught at Stage I or Stage II. For Stage IV breast cancer, the 5-year survival rate is approximately 20%.
It is unbelievably important to remember when you are looking at breast cancer statistics that they are just that, statistics. Everyone is different and this is a disease - at every stage - that a lot of women beat.