Out of State For Profit Hospital Corporations Have Broken the NM Medical System

Our medical system is broken. The solution is NOT to limit your own rights to hold accountable in court the national hospital corporations and private equity companies which have broken healthcare.  These out of state corporations now own over 90% of New Mexico hospitals.  

In a small state like ours without the resources for quality oversight, the only real check on out of state medical corporations is to have their cost-cutting or profit-driven misconduct judged by a jury of New Mexico citizens. It is not surprising that, as for-profit medicine has taken over New Mexico, there has been more medical malpractice and more justified outrage by New Mexico juries, resulting in larger verdicts. 

Here are the kind of things that have happened in New Mexico now that health “care” has been replaced with sickness for profit. 

When a Las Cruces hospital owned by an out of state hospital corporation was told that one of its doctors was implanting pacemakers and defibrillators into patients who did not need them, it briefly investigated, but left him on staff for five years because he was making the hospital so much money. 

The doctor would troll the emergency room and suggest to patients who were there for sprained ankles or other illnesses, that they have their hearts checked.  When they returned from the cath lab, he would soberly tell them they needed a pacemaker immediately.  If a patient expressed surprise, since they had never had any heart problems, and asked whether they had time for a second opinion, Dr. Klonis would tell them they could do so, but first, they would have to sign a piece of paper indicating that they were leaving against his medical advice and realized they might die on the way home.  

After watching this happen over and over again, within the first years, some of the courageous hospital staff anonymously reported this behavior to the CHS national hospital corporation on its hotline.  The investigation showed this one doctor was implanting nearly 25% of all the pacemakers in New Mexico and, because of these “economic credentials,” the hospital chain kept him on.  Over the five years he continued to work there, he billed between $30-50 million for the hospital, implanting medical devices most of his patients didn’t need at all. 

The hospital only fired this doctor after a group of 34 patients learned of his misconduct and filed suit against him and the hospital.  

This kind of profit-driven abandonment of patient-first care is most heartbreaking when an out of state corporation buys one of our small town hospitals. The small town rejoices because it thinks health care will improve. Often, the exact opposite happens. 

First, the hospital corporation cuts the number of  higher-paid doctors in the emergency room and elsewhere, replacing them with lower-paid male nurses or physician assistants in white coats with stethoscopes around their necks. Why men?  Because patients assume that, if they have seen a man in a white coat with a stethoscope, they have seen a doctor and don’t complain.  

Employees are replaced with independent contractors or temporary traveling staff, who don’t get benefits. People working in the hospital, including doctors are given quotas, numbers of patients they must see within an hour. We have even seen monthly “contests” where management publicly compares the numbers of patients each doctor has squeezed into his/her day and award bonuses to those who spend the least amount of time with each patient.  With that kind of approach to patient care, what could possibly go wrong?

When our client’s 6 year old daughter fell off playground equipment and suffered a mild concussion, her father could not have known that the doctor in the emergency room was a temporary, outsourced doctor whose incompetence had resulted in his firing at hospitals in other states. This made him a “cheap” hire for the hospital. The doctor inappropriately administered a paralytic medicine and unnecessarily intubated Natalie, inserting the wrong breathing tube into the wrong place, cutting off her oxygen completely. The result was to turn a mild concussion into a permanent brain injury. 

This brain injury meant that, for the rest of her life, this bright, precocious little girl can no longer communicate her wants, desires or simple bodily needs; can no longer reason; can no longer read;  will never walk normally; will never be able to fall in love, marry or care for children of her own.  Her parents will have to care for her the rest of her life.  The most painful thing about this for her family, is their belief that, locked inside herself, Natalie is aware of what she used to be able to do and what she has lost.  

Then, there was the 23 year old son of Hatch chile farmers, Joseph Mendoza, who went twice to the gutted (one doctor on duty) Emergency Room suffering from epiglottitis, a swelling of the epiglottis (the flap of skin in your throat that separates the air and food that goes down your throat). He was seen by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope, who he and his parents called “doctor.” He was a physician’s assistant and not a doctor. They never saw one.  The one real doctor, stuck in the back where he never saw him, wrote in the medical records, “suspect epiglottitis” after the PA described Joseph’s symptoms. 

The two things that should never happen when epiglottitis is suspected in a patient are: 

1. the throat should not be touched as it can cause the epiglottis to swell and close off the airway; and 
2. the patient should never be left alone, because if his airway closes, an airway has to be opened within minutes or the patient will experience brain injury or death.

After waiting hours in the ER while their son struggled to breathe, Joseph’s mother went to the admissions desk three times asking for help. 

Annoyed, the PA put Joseph in a wheelchair, took him into an exam room where he did a throat culture, poking a swab down his throat. After touching his throat, he rolled him down to the X-ray room where he stood Joseph up in front of the x-ray machine and then left him alone in the room. The x-ray captured the moment Joseph’s throat closed completely and he could no longer breathe.  

Panicked, Joseph began banging on the wall before he passed out. He was found blue on the floor. After being without oxygen for 8-13 minutes, he was permanently brain injured. The young man who walked into the hospital, would never walk or talk again and would be on a ventilator for years.

How do you fight back against these kinds of profit-driven tragedies by the out of state hospital corporations now running most of our hospitals?  

The language of these corporations is money and one of the few things they fear is a large monetary verdict, particularly punitive damages, which are not covered by insurance.  When 12 jurors speak with one voice, corporations are forced to listen, forced to change their money-driven policies and improve patient care. 

There are ways to fix healthcare and attract more doctors to our state, but stripping away your right and power to seek full justice in the courts is not one of them.  

If you or your family members have suffered the ravages of for-profit healthcare, like:

— Being diagnosed with cancer or something serious and calling for an appointment only to be told you have to wait 3 months to be seen; 

— Going to an overcrowded Emergency Room and waiting all night or longer to be seen or admitted; 

—  Being assigned a nurse or physician’s assistant rather than a doctor to see you; 

—  Seeing healthcare providers who are “on the clock” and can only spend a few minutes with you, not enough time to figure out what is wrong; 

Then you and your family are at risk for medical malpractice, injury and death.  Don’t be fooled into limiting your rights as a patient to insist on safe healthcare and to hold these out of state hospital corporations fully responsible when their cost-cutting measures cause you harm.