Doctors and nurses
You are at your daughter’s recital and you get a call that your elderly patient’s son needs to talk to you urgently. A colleague has a family emergency and the hospital needs you to work a double shift. Your patient’s M.R.I. isn’t covered and the only option is for you to call the insurance company and argue it out. You’re only allotted 15 minutes for a visit, but your patient’s medical needs require 45.
These quandaries are standard issue for doctors and nurses. Luckily, the response is usually standard issue as well: An overwhelming majority do the right thing for their patients, even at a high personal cost.
It is true that health care has become corporatized to an almost unrecognizable degree. But it is also true that most clinicians remain committed to the ethics that brought them into the field in the first place. This makes the hospital an inspiring place to work.
Increasingly, though, I’ve come to the uncomfortable realization that this ethic […]
Our county here in Pa. has been taken over by the University Of Pennsylvania Medical Center. They have taken over the hospital, the major medical centers , even the Cardiology center. They are all linked together on some mainframe somewhere which you can tell by calling the number for your center for a refill and get the same person’s voice asking the questions. It has been downhill ever since U.P.M.C. has taken over, and the bills have been higher, especially in the hospital which charged us $15,000 for just 2 days, and we were stuck with the 20% that Medicare doesn’t pay. It used to call much, much less when it was not controlled by U.P.M.C. , and the doctors have to take in many more patients to make up the cost they have to pay the new nurses they had to hire to do the extra paperwork involved.
I should add that the nurses were so incompetent that they did not respond to my wife when I rang her buzzer, and I had to run out to the main desk to holler at them to let them know that my wife’s lungs were filling up with fluid and she would have died if I had not been there. Luckily, she got to ICU in time to allow her cardiologist to revive her just in time. It was a really close call.