Very mean and scary: Dr. Prem Reddy; his hospitals are infamous for refusing to treat uninsured

comment | posted July 12, 2007 (web only)
Healthcare vs. the Profit Principle
Barbara Ehrenreich
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/ehrenreich

It's always nice to see the President take a principled stand on something. The man formerly known as "43"--and now perhaps better named "29" for his record-breaking low approval rating--is promising to battle any expansion of government health insurance for children, and not because he hates children or refuses to cough up the funds. No, this is a battle over principle: private healthcare vs. government-provided healthcare. Speaking in Cleveland recently, Bush boldly asserted:
I strongly object to the government providing incentives for people to leave private medicine, private health care to the public sector. And I think it's wrong and I think it's a mistake. And therefore, I will resist Congress's attempt ... to federalize medicine....In my judgment that would be--it would lead to not better medicine, but worse medicine. It would lead to not more innovation, but less innovation.

Now you don't have to have seen Sicko to know that if there is one area of human endeavor where private enterprise doesn't work, it's healthcare. Consider the private, profit-making insurance industry, which Bush is so determined to defend. What "innovations" has it produced? The deductible, the co-pay and the pre-existing condition are the only ones that leap to mind. In general, the great accomplishment of the private health insurance industry has been to overturn the very meaning of "insurance," which is risk-sharing: We all put in some money, though only some of us will need to draw on the common pool by using expensive healthcare. And the insurance companies have overturned it by refusing to insure the people who need care the most--those who are already, or are likely to become, sick.

<<snip>>

This is not because health insurance executives are meaner than other people, although I do not rule that out. It's just that they're running a business, the purpose of which is not to make people healthy but to make money, and they do very well at that. Once, many years ago, I complained to the left-wing economist Paul Sweezey that America had no real healthcare system. "We have a system, all right," he responded. "It's just a system for doing something else." A system, as he might have put it today, for extracting money from the vulnerable and putting it into the pockets of the rich.

<<snip>>... Sunday's Los Angeles Times featured a particularly lurid case of medical profiteering in the form of one Dr. Prem Reddy, who owns eight hospitals in Southern California... <<snip>>

The secret behind his $300 million fortune? For one thing, he rejects the standard hospital practice of signing contracts with insurance companies, because he feels that these contracts unduly limit his reimbursements. (In a battle between Aetna and Reddy, it would be hard to know which side to cheer for.) In addition, he has suspended much-needed services such as chemotherapy, a birthing center and mental- health care as insufficiently profitable. And his hospitals are infamous for refusing to treat uninsured patients, like a patient with kidney failure and a 16-month-old baby with a burn.

But Dr. Reddy--who is, incidentally a high-powered Republican donor--has a principled reason for his piratical practices. "Patients," the Los Angeles Times reports him as saying, "may simply deserve only the amount of care they can afford." He dismisses as "an entitlement mentality" the idea that everyone should be getting the same high-quality healthcare. This is Bush's vaunted principle of "private medicine" at its nastiest: You don't get what you need, only what you can pay for.

This problem would have been less severe by now had she done that.

The Supremes REFUSED to allow Florida to count all the votes.

from the begining, Nader or no Nader, Gore never had a chance.

heard of this Dr. or his hospitals?

I am a controller of a medical clinic in CA. We have canceled many of our contracts with insurance companies because they do not pay enough to cover the costs of services. This forces the patient to pay more. It is not our clinic that should be bashed but the insurance companies. We have gone through a serious cash flow crisis and dumping the contracts is part of the recovery. We also may have to close our OB dept that serves mostly Medical patients because the reimbursements are to small to pay for the services.

The biggest cost is the doctors salaries and doctors will go where the money is. If we don't pay them what they want they go elsewhere.


You would not own a business where you continue to lose money, how do you expect someone else to?

Those who are making money are the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance companies and many of the doctors.


I am sure we will some day have a single payer system and it will benefit the majority of patients at the expense of those making money today.

but that's the problem. Why are we the only industrialized nation in the world without some kine of health insurance for everyone? Its because of this kind of thinking: "I strongly object to the government providing incentives for people to leave private medicine." Priorities are all backward in D.C.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x3378253

Bush Is Prepared to Veto Bill to Expand Child Insurance
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: July 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/washington/15child.ht...

WASHINGTON, July 14 — The White House said on Saturday that President Bush would veto a bipartisan plan to expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program, drafted over the last six months by senior members of the Senate Finance Committee.

<<snip>>

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, said: “The president’s senior advisers will certainly recommend a veto of this proposal. And there is no question that the president would veto it.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Congrees, Bush Clash Over Children's Health Insurance
Plans to Renew Program Bog Down as Lawmakers Debate Funding, Philosophy

By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 15, 2007; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...

<<snip>>

President Bush has attacked the proposals as big-government attempts to enlarge the federal role in health care, saying they would siphon choice away from individuals and reduce private insurance coverage for some children. He has proposed about $5 billion in new funding for children's health insurance over five years, for a total of $30 billion -- an amount that the Congressional Budget Office says would be too little to keep covering even just the number of children enrolled in the program now.

<<snip>>

Bruce Lesley, president of the Alexandria-based nonprofit First Focus, said limiting growth to $35 billion would be "a serious setback for children with and without public health coverage."
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Besides I thought it was illegal to refuse medical care to a patient even if they have no insurance.

:grr:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=3333824

Doctors refusing to care for patients based on "values"
Posted by dajoki in General Discussion: Politics
Fri Jun 22nd 2007, 04:45 PM
Doctors' beliefs can hinder patient care
New laws shore up providers’ right to refuse treatment based on values

By Sabrina Rubin Erdely
Updated: 2 hours, 12 minutes ago
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19190916 /

Lori Boyer couldn't stop trembling as she sat on the examining table, hugging her hospital gown around her. Her mind was reeling. She'd been raped hours earlier by a man she knew — a man who had assured Boyer, 35, that he only wanted to hang out at his place and talk. Instead, he had thrown her onto his bed and assaulted her. "I'm done with you," he'd tonelessly told her afterward. Boyer had grabbed her clothes and dashed for her car in the freezing predawn darkness. Yet she'd had the clarity to drive straight to the nearest emergency room — Good Samaritan Hospital in Lebanon, Pennsylvania — to ask for a rape kit and talk to a sexual assault counselor. Bruised and in pain, she grimaced through the pelvic exam. Now, as Boyer watched Martin Gish, M.D., jot some final notes into her chart, she thought of something the rape counselor had mentioned earlier.

"I'll need the morning-after pill," she told him.

Dr. Gish looked up. He was a trim, middle-aged man with graying hair and, Boyer thought, an aloof manner. "No," Boyer says he replied abruptly. "I can't do that." He turned back to his writing.

Boyer stared in disbelief. No? She tried vainly to hold back tears as she reasoned with the doctor: She was midcycle, putting her in danger of getting pregnant. Emergency contraception is most effective within a short time frame, ideally 72 hours. If he wasn't willing to write an EC prescription, she'd be glad to see a different doctor. Dr. Gish simply shook his head. "It's against my religion," he said, according to Boyer. (When contacted, the doctor declined to comment for this article.)

Boyer left the emergency room empty-handed. "I was so vulnerable," she says. "I felt victimized all over again. First the rape, and then the doctor making me feel powerless." Later that day, her rape counselor found Boyer a physician who would prescribe her EC. But Boyer remained haunted by the ER doctor's refusal — so profoundly, she hasn't been to see a gynecologist in the two and a half years since. "I haven't gotten the nerve up to go, for fear of being judged again," she says.

<<snip>>

That's exactly what's happening in medical offices and hospitals around the country: Catholic and conservative Christian health care providers are denying women a range of standard, legal medical care. Planned Parenthood M.D.s report patients coming to them because other gynecologists would not dole out birth control prescriptions or abortion referrals. Infertility clinics have turned away lesbians and unmarried women; anesthesiologists and obstetricians are refusing to do sterilizations; Catholic hospitals have delayed ending doomed pregnancies because abortions are only allowed to save the life of the mother. In a survey published this year in The New England Journal of Medicine, 63 percent of doctors said it is acceptable to tell patients they have moral objections to treatments, and 18 percent felt no obligation to refer patients elsewhere. And in a recent SELF.com poll, nearly 1 in 20 respondents said their doctors had refused to treat them for moral, ethical or religious reasons. "It's obscene," says Jamie D. Brooks, a former staff attorney for the National Health Law Program who continues to work on projects with the Los Angeles advocacy group. "Doctors swear an oath to serve their patients. But instead, they are allowing their religious beliefs to compromise patient care. And too often, the victims of this practice are women."

and the DLC enables them on. They want it for Medicine, for Social Security, for Insurance, for the media.... and if you count Blackwater, for the military. Heck Halliburton has already been granted the mineral rights for Mars.

If it were up to them, we'd all be living on the streets, working for 50-cents an hour, and changing their diapers for free.

TC

let their forgiving wives change their diapers for them. Or they can go to their Church.

http://www.premreddy.com/

He's quite impressed with himself.

What a joke.