How some are abusing EMTALA in futile cases:
Zee Klein wasn’t about to just let her mother die, no matter what some hospital committee decided. But instead of waging a high-profile fight against the hospital, she decided to get her mother out on her own.It wasn’t going to be easy. For one, Medicare wouldn’t cover Pereira’s care if she were transferred to Christus St. Joseph, the downtown hospital where a doctor had agreed to take the case. Her coverage for her particular diagnosis already had been exhausted at Memorial Hermann.
Further complicating matters, Pereira’s condition was deteriorating fast “” by the time the hospital’s futility committee ruled, she was in respiratory distress and her kidneys were failing. Doctors wrote in her chart that the discharge was against their advice.
“The patient was unstable,” Castriotta said. “Given how sick she was, doctors felt her release would be dangerous.”
The moment wasn’t lost on Klein.
“She looked like she was in the throes of dying,” said Klein, 68, who had previously cared for her late husband when he suffered a stroke and numerous heart attacks. “We didn’t know how long she had.”
Still, Klein had a plan. She would have her mother transferred back to St. Dominic nursing home for several hours, then taken to St. Joseph’s emergency room, where federal law would require she be admitted.
(via Scalpel again)
Related posts:
- Futile care
- Futile care
- How we spend the most money on futile care
- Should letting a premature infant die be considered health care rationing?
- Health care reform on a state level
- Surprise: Ethics committees often agree with physicians
- Futile care in Canada
{ 3 comments }
“It all took a toll financially. Pereira went on Medicaid last May, after her home health care needs depleted her savings. In addition, Klein estimates her mother’s final years cost several hundred thousand dollars. Probably a third of that, she says, was since mid-2006. She says she has no idea how much the bill was to Medicare and Medicaid.”
Well it is about d*** time someone got an idea how much this cost working people and taxpayers. Not to mention the toll this took on the underfunded Medicaid program we have here in Texas.
It is one thing to spend your own dollars, it is another to spend mine. Public funds simply CANNOT be spent like this just because a family wants to. I would like the federal government and the state of Texas to send them a bill.
Amen. The daughter should reimburse the taxpayer and then she should be jailed for elder abuse!!!!!!!!
that situation happens like every day in NYC.
If only family were forced to spend just ONE PERCENT of projected costs to stick demented old grandpa in the ICU on a vent for a couple weeks, I think we’d see a lot more humane & realistic palliative care at the end of life.
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