Woman dies in hospital while being arrested
 

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...la-home-center

damn.....

This is sad. She's a human being and for people in a hostpital to react to her in that way is unheard of.

The police didn't do anything wrong either by arresting her and taking her out of the emergency room?

I think the police should have known something was wrong with her.

That's huge malpractice and wrongful death suit somebody will have to pay to this family.

You can see chick is morbidly obese and had gallstones. That means they were near her hepatic portal vein. So yes, that chit goes back to the heart... Worse yet, if it burst and broke in bagillion microscopic pieces that got into her capillaries that may be damaged due to hypertension, then she probably had a embolism and stroked out.

But, that's pure speculation on my part.

That's just jacked up.

The article says she died of a bowel perf., which led to poisening, basically. I can't even imagine how much that must have hurt.

We need tort reform to protect hospitals from the out of control jury verdicts which will be the result of such cases :(

(not really)

i think people in general just sue entirely too much.

in this case? with all the other problems this hospital had? they need to be sued for every dime they have.

The police aren't medical professionals. When you call 911 you need to realize that we can't all do the same thing.
It looks like it's a shitty hospital anyway and a lot of ED nurses are pretty jaded after working the job for so long. A lot of fakers do come through the ED.

very true. hell, they were in a hospital...they probably assumed she had been treated and was just acting a fool so she wouldnt have to go to jail.

i hope the hospital gets sued and also the pd and also the nurses and drs who didn't do anything when the cops were there and also the company that manufacutured her bed sheets

i don't think people sue enough in this country, everytime sometime says that, I think they just think that because of the liberal media

What the hell?

There's legislation on the table in my state which would completely immunize emergency rooms from claims by uninsured parties.

ehhhh...so much for the Hippocratic oath....hehehe...

So, if you don't have health insurace, and you have a heart attack, and they refuse to treat you, and you die in the lobby, your family couldn't sue?

Simple answer?

NO.


If a hospital sees that u have no visible means to pay for treatment they can refuse treatment, in most cases they will get u to sign a waiver...but that still is dependent on state to state laws as well as the facility itself

Nah, I think it's more like if the doctor (who isn't going to get paid to help you) gives you negligent care, you're not going to be able to sue him.

In this case, I don't know just by reading the article whether or not the hospital is even going to be in trouble. The standard of care for a facility of this type is going to be really, really low. As a matter of law, this woman's estate might have no case as crazy as it seems.

Private hospitals can refuse to treat, but public hospitals cannot. And even private hospitals MUST treat in an emergency.

^^^@ kevin...how can your state justify completely disregarding claims by people who have no insurance? if the hospital is wrong, they are wrong!

my friends uninsured grandfather was DROPPED by two nurses moving him from the emergency room's wheelchair to the bed. he broke both hips, and when they did surgery to repair that, he got a bacterial infection and died. umm, im no expert, but would someone like to tell me where his family isnt due some sort of compensation? oh, and did i mention he was just going in because of a migraine? what are uninsured people supposed to do, stay home and die?

I believe also, in some cases (again dependent on the state) since an ER's job also it is to triage patients, they can refer patients who are not suffereing from life threatening symptoms to urgent care facilities and if they can get a person to go and free up space for true life threatening situations, they take the liability off of themselves.

and again....the keys here are 'can' and state to state....

Matter of fact let me ask....

Kevin: Where you are, do citizen get charged for the ambulance should they require one?

People in DC and Baltimore City can be charged anywhere from $75 to $150 dollars "service and dischage fee" should you ever require one and bill it to you directly (before they send it to insurance....heh)

I know many places you are charged, but the fee is waived if you are admitted.

hell daemon, if you were a bit further south in the wonderful Commonwealth of VA, you could be charged more than that...my fiance got a bill for $375. his insurance covered 100 of it...i understand a fee, but my goodness that is a bit much, dont you think?

right....

also back to the example about the grandfather being dropped in the hospital:

This is part and parcel why the govt needs to try and look into overhauling the nation's insurance system becuase too many people cannot afford it and too many insurance companies have too many tricks and loopholes for things that they won't cover.

A friend of mine told me this:

One company that she worked for has the following in ther policy

Dependent upon the client company,(like proctor and gamble, muzac, or Verisign) they have a policy where if you go to a covered or non covered ER under the and it's a life threatening emergency, they will cover anywhere from 70% to 100% of the cost


If it's not life threatening, then the most they will cover in some cases will be as much as 50%

and then if you disagree, you have to appeal with the hospital and the insurance company (which can take anywhere from 3 to 6 months by which time they have already sent thie bill to collections) just to get charges reversed.

Slightly off topic: but what i found most intruging is this lil portion of the policy for the company she worked for....

If you are over the age of 50 and you go in for a preventive care colon screening (which a preventive care screening is covered @ 100%) and during the screening, they remove any polyphs or treat you, it then is no longer a preventive and in most cases, they don't tell the patient and the patient doesn't usually find this out until they get a bill in the mail....which then she does her job and case manages the claims.....

So, whatever insurance you have...please read your policy thorughly!

My insurance is refusing to cover my tubal because they say that it's not routine to perform a tubal when performing a ceasarian. My ass it's not. I have at least three friends that had it done.

hey, Im in DC and worked in Alexandria for a year.....for an insurance company....LOL...I have heard the stories....matter of fact my new insurance info just came in the mail a week ago, I am still reading thru it...


Anybody ever take a look at Health Reinbursement/ Savings Plans?


If so, please thoroughly check ur policy...u would be surprised the things u have to come out of ur pockets for.

The argument is that if you are forcing a hospital to provide care to folks who won't pay and then double hitting the hospitals (who are already overworked) and the docs who are working for less every time there's a negligence claim, you're going to dry up the number of emergency care facilities open to treat anyone at all.

I don't necessarily agree with all of that. I do think I agree with one provision recently offered which would grant a doctor immunity from negligence claims when he's volunteering his time in an E.R.

Did he get any compensation? It's almost a close case.

But look at the dollars and cents of the situation... The hospital costs a lot of money to run. They're treating your uninsured grandfather at great expense. The hospital operates to make a profit. Would you encourage the hospital to close its emergency room in order to avoid taking these sorts of patients? Surely this would be more profitable.

Lulz...that's a damn cheap ambulance ride. At my company, your insurance is getting billed around $800-1000. So when you hear me complain about medicare and medicaid abuse it's because of these people who are too damn lazy to take a car to their doctors appointments or the emergency room and just call us. We've had patients (regulars) who had to wait for a ride on one of our busy days and when they got tired of waiting their family came and got them. That kind of shit makes me so angry.

Also Alphafrog is correct-public, state-funded hospitals cannot refuse treatment. Private hospitals can. Here's a nice story for you: guy goes to a Fallon clinic (don't know if you know Fallon at all, but their clinics are infamous in my business, we go there a lot). He has chest pain, all the classic signs of an MI (heart attack). He doesn't have insurance. Nurse tells him there's nothing they can do because he's uninsured. Guy goes home, dead the next day.

Free health care is not a right.

centaur....devil's advocate...

why didn't he go to another facility?

**Kevin yo do have a point BTW**

or...why didn't (or did she) the nurse refer him to a facility that would probably see him?

It's a messed up situation no matter how u call it but somewhere along the line one has to wonder what could have been done to save this guy's live...

Die, poor people, die. We get it. :rolleyes:

I didn't say it was...however, an MI is an emergency, not a routine doctor's appointment. Ambulances don't pick and choose their patients based upon who has insurance. It's now illegal in MA to be uninsured anyway.
Healthcare should be a right anyway-everyone is entitled to try and prolong their life as much as possible. Having lived in a country with free healthcare and one where healthcare is privatized, I've seen both sides of the fence and I can see the need for improvement in both systems.
I don't know why the nurse wouldn't call him an ambulance. From hearing all the horror stories of Fallon clinics, I'm not surprised though. The standard of care seems to be low.

How does that work? That's pretty much a fee just for living. If I HAD to be insured, and my husband didn't work at a huge corperation with great insurance, we couldn't afford it. And I'm pretty sure we wouldn't qualify for Medicaid.

Wouldn't it be standard of care for the type of medicine, not necessarily for the type of facility? We talked about this quite a bit in class, about the standard of care being somewhat fixed. That may be more CT tort law though, so I could be wrong.

Does this mean you think health care is in fact a "right"?

Also, I'm pretty sure the "standard of care" is not set by the facility - minor nitpick on Kevin's point, but that's my understanding of the standard. I would be shocked if there is no action against the facility, given the description of the actions of the nursing staff.

ETA: (ksigkid posted this at the same time as I did)

This has been the case for the cases I've worked on, which include states in every time zone. IANAL, obviously, but again - reasonable professional, blah blah blah.

I know Blue Cross Blue Shield have come out with some very inexpensive plans that provide very good coverage. My company uses Fallon for health insurance which I'm not wild about so I was looking at the BCBS plans. I use them now and I'd like to keep them.
http://www.getbluema.com is the website for their plans. There's also Masshealth and the medicare/medicaid programs but I don't know the qualifying factors for those. Masshealth is a pretty decent program as well. I would say that this law is the one good thing Romney has done for the state because it's pushing companies to be more flexible and allowing people to get insurance and good healthcare.

Torts was so long ago :)

Whatever the standard of care is will usually be defined by whatever your local legislature, in its wisdom has decided that it is. I'm pretty sure you're right -- the locality rule wouldn't really talk about the type of facility, just the type of medicine. Still though, the standard of care in an overloaded emergency hospital in the worst part of town under the locality rule would be different than say the Yale-New Haven Hospital unless you were one of those national standard folks.

Then, the standard would still have to be established by expert testimony.

Haha, sorry, don't want to dredge up all the 1L stuff. I actually had a talk with my torts professor about this very point, i.e. it not making sense to hold small community hospital A to the same standard as big educational medical center B. I'm pretty sure CT does precisely that, and I think that's one reason why CT medical professionals are trying hard to revamp the med-mal system here in the state.

If you want to read a solid book on the topic (you know, in your free time, haha), Damages by Barry Werth talks about a family going through the med-mal system.

I think it's a nationwide movement. We recently shot down a massive tort reform bill here in Oklahoma (governor vetoed it). Amongst numerous things like a 300K cap to noneconomic damages in ALL suits, it included such gems as making the safety records of nursing homes undiscoverable and making it so that a class action suit couldn't be brought for the non-payment of oil and gas royalties. Good stuff.

Die lazy people, die.

If poor = lazy, a higher mortality rate is great for our economy. I'm not saying we round them up in concentration camps, but I'm certainly not going to advocate that society go out of its way to prolong the lives of people who refuse to contribute to it.