Who Killed Georgie? (Chapter 3)
~”Lawyers Who Help Doctors to Get Away With Murder”
— “The Med-Mal Factory” —
It’s not in my nature to be derogatory, but it is also difficult for me to not crusade for what I believe is right. This story has two headlines that I’m working on, and both lead to the truth about — not only “Who Killed Georgie” but also — why Louisiana ranks at the bottom of the barrel in health care: 05/14/2019 “La. Ranked 45th Worst State for Health Care”
As I mentioned at the onset, this story is live from New Orleans, or from wherever you live (except a few states that, through lawsuits, are prevented from helping medical providers to get away with murder)….
Admittedly, I’ve been grappling with how to “tell” this story — already broken into three partial-chapters because in recent years I’ve been writing in the language of “law” and not “journalism.” I have to re-set my brain, so please bear with.
Meanwhile, let’s begin 50 years ago when the medical-mistake claims-process system was created and made into law. The history of this “special legislation” (passed in 1973 by mostly-lawyer legislators) proclaims the law was necessary to address a “high cost of medical-malpractice insurance” problem.
The lawyer-legislators testified to one another that Louisiana doctors’ malpractice insurance cost them too much and needed to be subsidized; and that medical providers would “flee the state” if something isn’t done about it. Of course, this insurance also covers the cost of the many lawyers the many doctors will need to defend the many medical mistake inquiries.
So a backup “Fund” was created (and initially funded) by the Legislature 50 years ago to pay citizens’ medical-mistake claims (in excess of the $100,000 covered by the providers’ cheap insurance policies). The legislature had also set a monetary limit on the amount that can be sued for: $500,000.
In other words, if Georgie’s siblings and the hospital decided to settle the dispute, the medical provider need only tender its $100,000 policy — and “the Fund” pays out the remainder of the claim (up to a maximum $500,000 limit a victim can collect, under the same, 50-year-old, Medical-Malpractice Act.
Since the facts of this story are pretty tedious, lets just stop here and take a dance break, this edit being a Sunday during the pandemic when close-contact with humans is taboo (even in New Orleans (:
…Today of course we know there never was a health provider-insurance problem 50 years ago — or today; proven by none other than CDC/NIH in-depth statistical analyses. More importantly, about that same time began the real “medical-insurance” problem of citizens’ lack of access to affordable health insurance, which has spiraled into today’s low health-outcomes and high incidence of unnecessary (otherwise treatable) premature deaths in Louisiana.
Yet, the agency created by the Legislature in 1973, remains today. In fact, it has grown into a +$1.5-billion “bureaucratic monster” that — itself — is killing the citizens for whom it was (and still is) established to help….
This approach doesn’t seem to be working, so as readers are asleep already, perhaps an explanation of court briefs on “issues of law” is a better beginning; I don’t know….
Hmm, be right back, Sophie (mine and my youngest-sister’s coywolf of 15 years, rescued after being swept from her pack in the nearby swamps during “Hurricane Katrina”) is very ill and I must attend to her. At this moment she is more important than the med-mal factory & its machine-like merchants-of-death I’m attempting to expose or describe or bring to account or to educate the public about — and myself….
Sophie (part coyote, part wolf) would like me to toss in a bit of levity into this otherwise sad, gray-wolf story, as she prepares in her old age to visit her sister-Shepherd, Rosa — and Georgie — on “the other side”:
“Sophie our beautiful coywolf flies into the air to catch frisbees & sticks — but also will happily dive into the Muddy Mississippi after them. Here, she’s pleasantly-surprised when a Louisiana pelican drops-in on Sophie’s morning swim, no doubt thinking the stick I threw was a flying fish! (:
In a way, Sophie’s pending death-by-euthanasia somewhat parallels the story of “Who Killed Georgie” — was it forced-euthanasia in order to “shut him up” about the nurse spilling the urine pouch onto his catheter? Could a hospital system be so, premeditatedly, vile? Do hospitals do this regularly? Not because — like Sophie — the patient’s “quality of life” has become so diminished (difficult to walk, much-less to jump into the air after a driftwood stick)…. But doctors “dump” patients into hospice, nursing homes, other unsuspecting hospitals, to home-care, etc. — perhaps, to cover their asses. Maybe they think (or realize) they’ll get sued for infecting patients being examined or treated? Or the hospitals are they afraid the Medicare payments agency, CMS, will fine them or cut them out completely from the government payment system — for having too many deadly-infection outbreaks, or what’s known as “hospital-acquired infections” (HAIs); which are caused by types of bacterium found almost-only in hospital emergency department settings (i.e., “MRSA,” “Staph”). Medicare payments are many for-profit hospitals’ bread-and-butter, I’d suspect….
What the heck, here’s another “dog video” from a time Sophie & Rosa (as Bob Dylan also confessed in his bio) liked New Orleans best:
…from a time when these two Shepherds happily fetched driftwood sticks in the freezing-cold wind on the Mississippi River levee, our “backyard” — a stone’s-throw from our small but sacred, “slave-quarters” shack located inside New Orleans’ “French Quarter” (a cozy, approximately 10-square-block, residential neighborhood originally called La Vieux Carre’ (the old square) by original settlers Bienville. Founded as a military-style grid of seventy squares in 1718 by French Canadian naval officer Jean Baptiste Bienville
This video has a sidebar story as well, the musician-artist performing during the “BP” oil disaster that not only killed a score of oil-field workers and ol’ Slewfoot’s little bird (another to be re-posted) but also the “street-music” and other arts businesses that catered to tourists — BP caused starving artists to literally starve, and to play for change in the freezing-ass cold winter streets of New Orleans….
Andrew would already be at the river by the time my dogs and I arrived at the Mississippi levee every morning for years, and I lived in the rich neighborhood just across the levee. Andrew lived in the 9th Ward miles away…. I always admired the so-called “street musicians” of New Orleans; being a musician myself, I can’t even imagine playing well-enough to consider myself worthy of money. But these folk, most, I got to learn, were musicians’ musicians. They lived music just like the many old jazz muso’s I also knew and followed-around like a ‘70’s groupie….
Be right back….Sophie duties.
It’s not in my nature to be derogatory, but it is also difficult for me to not crusade for what I believe is right. This story has two headlines that I’m working on, and both lead to the truth about — not only “Who Killed Georgie” but also — why Louisiana ranks at the bottom of the barrel in health care: 05/14/2019 “La. Ranked 45th Worst State for Health Care”
