Marble Falls       The Hippocratic Oath, which is allegedly the touchstone for all doctors, says, “Do No Harm.”  Seems straight forward enough.  Yet, we read more and more a litany of issues where the opposite seems to be happening.  Furthermore, financial gain, rather than healthcare or medical ethics, seems to be driving the problem.

Most recently, a huge study in New Jersey raises new alarms of severe discrimination in health care based on race.  The Times reports that a …new report of nearly one million births in 68 hospitals in New Jersey, one of the largest studies to tackle the subject found that obstetricians are more likely to give Black women unnecessary cesarean sections, putting those women at higher risk for serious complications like ruptured surgical wounds.  And, if that’s not bad enough,

The additional operations on Black patients were more likely to happen when hospitals had no scheduled C-sections, meaning their operating rooms were sitting empty. That suggests that racial bias paired with financial incentives played a role in doctors’ decision-making, the researchers said.

What the frick?!?  There’s an empty operating room in New Jersey, so let’s roll in the next black woman coming into the hospital to have a baby…is that what’s up in Jersey?  Worse, if it’s happening in New Jersey, what might be the case in some of the rest of the country?

In fairly recent news, this isn’t all of it, even if it might be the worst of it in this race to the bottom on US healthcare.  Since we’re on the subject of babies, there was another report, this time in the Journal recently that indicated doctors and hospitals know what to do with preemies now, but sometimes don’t bother, putting their hospital – and paycheck – ahead of parent and baby needs.

Doctors are now capable of saving the lives of babies born at 22 weeks and, in rare cases, a week earlier, with improved techniques to help tiny lungs develop and protect fragile skin and organs. Hospitals with extensive experience resuscitating extremely premature babies report survival rates as high as 67% for babies born at 22 weeks.  Yet most hospitals don’t try—and parents often aren’t aware of what’s possible or that other hospitals, even just a few miles away.

It’s not just babies, of course.  There’s a long line of problems.  Take the Acadia psych hospitals for example.  An exhaustive Times’ report found they were holding patients in their hospitals and not releasing them in order to milk insurance companies.

In at least 12 of the 19 states where Acadia operates psychiatric hospitals, dozens of patients, employees and police officers have alerted the authorities that the company was detaining people in ways that violated the law, according to records reviewed by The Times. In some cases, judges have intervened to force Acadia to release patients.

Doctors and some hospitals might say, Acadia is just a bad apple, and, yeah, New Jersey sucks, and some hospitals shouldn’t be handling difficult pregnancies, but that just doesn’t cut it.  Furthermore, hospital malfeasance seems to be baked into the business model.  These days it seems to be all about the money.  Another Journal report, documents that concern:

Hospitals are adding billions of dollars in facility fees to medical bills for routine care in outpatient centers they own. Once an annoyance, the fees are now pervasive, and in some places they are becoming nearly impossible to avoid, data compiled for The Wall Street Journal show. The fees are spreading as hospitals press on with acquisitions, snapping up medical groups and tacking on the additional charges.

ACORN, Labor Neighbor Research & Training Center, and Local 100 have been looking at nonprofit hospital’s abysmal record of handling charity care for years, but maybe we should be looking past that to everything that is happening once a patient walks in the doors?  These doctor and hospital problems are too big for us, but why isn’t the government – at every level – doing more to bring both doctors and hospitals to account?