Public Officials, Community Members Rally 'Round LICH
About a week after Long Island College Hospital announced that it would sell off two more buildings and shutter its maternity ward, city officials (including Councilmember Bill de Blasio, above) and community folk rallied to urge Continuum Partners, LICH’s parent body, to select another strategy to pay off its $170 million of debt. The question…
About a week after Long Island College Hospital announced that it would sell off two more buildings and shutter its maternity ward, city officials (including Councilmember Bill de Blasio, above) and community folk rallied to urge Continuum Partners, LICH’s parent body, to select another strategy to pay off its $170 million of debt. The question no one seems able to answer is why they made obstetrics the victim, when child rearing is the new black here in Brooklyn, and maternity wards are closing elsewhere in the borough—Victory Memorial Hospital in Bay Ridge lost its labor and delivery unit in December because of money troubles, and Interfaith Medical Center in Bedford-Stuy lost its maternity ward in 2004. State Sen. Marty Connor made a suggestion, since many of these Brooklyn neighborhoods are growing younger. Maybe instead, they should have cut gerontology, he said.
Officials Urge LICH to Reconsider [Eagle]
LICH Selling Off More Buildings [Brownstoner]
LICH Sales: Real Estate Roguery? [Brownstoner]
Photo by William Alatriste.
Let them dump their buildings before the market hits bottom. Say no more. Guest 04 has spoken.
dittoburg:
The CIA factbook reports data from the WHO in this instance. The WHO simply reports data given to them by member nations. There is no analysis, no verification, nothing.
FinanceGuy:
While you have spent quite a bit of time defending out corrupt legal system, I will point out that your opinion is ultimately irrelevant. The numbers speak for themselves – no doctor wants to deliver babies for a living because it’s just not worth the cost or hassle. There are plenty of other medical fields to pursue.
dittoburg:
1) Cuba is a totalitarian state. We do not have any way to verify or refute the claims presented by the Cuban government about anything, especially medical care – one of their celebrated causes. Go there and attempt to see for yourself first hand and you will be arrested.
2) We do know that Cuba does not count a child as alive until it has lived for a few hours. They also have a very high abortion rate. Women are often required to terminate pregnancies if there is a high probability the child will have health problems. There really is no comparison. In the US, we somehow have this policy where women are allowed to have as many children as they want at the expense of the state. This is not the case in Cuba.
LICH has a great lactation consultant, and their maternity ward is no worse than any other, from the stories I’ve heard about others. That said, my own experiences with the hospital since haven’t been so great. The last time I was there for a broken ankle they took 10 x-rays of my knee, just to show the new residents how to work the machine. When I complained, they wheeled me back into the ER and left me there in pain for an hour until I agreed to let them take more x-rays. Then they told me if I actually wanted any of my medical records to give to my orthopedist, I would have to show up in person and request them. Remember now, I couldn’t walk… I want to like LICH, I really do — or did — they actually saved my daughter’s life and that gives me some sentimental loyalty, but… something’s definitely going on there. Something not for the better.
Yes, they are CIA figures too, so it is pretty convincing. Its not like it is a self-reported “fact”.
I’m really curious what the explanation for that is, dittoberg? It goes beyond embarrassing.
I know that Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate than the USA. But they don’t pay their doctors as much.
And if you don’t live in downtown Brooklyn or Park Slope? And depending on traffic and the time of day it can be very hard to get to Manhattan. Especially if you’re in labor.
And having seen my sister make a trek, in labor, from the Bronx to LICH (the head of the department at the time was a renowned specialist in difficult pregnancies who went to LICH midterm in her pregnancy from Columbia Presbyterian), blithely waving aside the closings is certainly no answer. And according to her, no fun either.
I wonder if part of the problem isn’t just insurance companies settling when they shouldn’t but their policy of dragging out everything so they can up their billable hours. A friend’s mother died from gross- and well documented- malpractice and the insurance company dragged it out for 5 years with various strategies before allowing the case to come to trail. The day they were to pick a jury the insurance company came up with an offer. And I won’t go into some of the demeaning and insulting depositions my friend was put through by them as if she were the culprit, not the victim.
Doctors are absolutely NOT liable for developmental issues, unless the doctor caused the issue by his or her own incompetent treatment. The tort system is not a substitute for national health insurance.
In tort, there is no liability without negligence (i.e., carelessness) and fault (unreasonableness). Doctors are only liable for MALpractice. That means the victim needs to prove that the doctor did something wrong–not only that the patient suffered some injury, but that the injury was the result of the doctor not taking ordinary care and not acting in a professional manner.
If the doctor treated according to standard procedures in the community, the patient loses, regardless of how bad he or she suffered or was injured, and even regardless of whether a better equipped doctor in a better hospital could have prevented the injury.
Tort recovery rates, despite what the insurance companies and tabloids repeat constantly, are actually quite low–most injured patients don’t sue, and most of those who do, lose.
So, if the LICH ObGyn department has extraordinary tort liability, there are basically two possibilities: (1) they are not treating patients competently; or (2) their insurance company is settling cases they shouldn’t be (i.e., they have incompetent lawyers).
Epidemiological evidence strongly suggests that smaller departments have worse results. Practice makes perfect, apparently. So leaving aside tort liability, there is a great deal of sense in folding small departments into a smaller number of larger ones. It isn’t hard to get from downtown Brooklyn to Park Slope or Manhattan.