No Regulation Means No Accountability

Some institutions often become so big, or famous, or powerful, that they become unregulated. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles is just such an institution. Oh, sure, Cedars-Sinai has a great reputation and is well known as the Medical Center to the Stars. They even have hotel quality suites for new celebrity moms with 24 hour nurses available, even when the rest of the hospital is experiencing a nurse shortage.

But what about the little people there? Well, since we're just little people, we really don't count for much. Our first experience there was when my wife gave birth to our son in August 2002. The care was despicable, from the moment we came in to the moment we left six days later. They had to induce labor for my wife. That didn't go so well, and telling all those thirty-six hours (yes, 36 hours) would just take too long. At the end, they finally had to do an emergency C-Section.

Then came recovery. After a C-Section, a mother typically stays at the hospital for several days to recover. Those days were a nightmare. First, they completely ignored my wife. They ignored her requests. They ignored her calls for help, which weren't many. They ignored instructions to keep our newborn son in the nursery for the night (long story there, too). After four days, she hadn't recovered at all. The discharging nurse was awful and nasty. I guess she really wanted to work up in the celebrity suites. Suffice it to say, she recovered more in the first twenty-four hours she was home than under the caring, well, care, of the staff at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Our next experience was for myself. I was having gall-bladder issues and had to go to the emergency room there. The only competent person was the ultrasound tech! We got there about 4:30 in the afternoon. Didn't get home until after midnight. The nurse tried to find a vein in which to insert an IV. She couldn't, and when she finally did, she did such a poor job that every movement was painful. When I complained, her response was that I should take it like a man! I finally asked a different nurse to have it removed. And in case you think my veins are difficult to find, they are NOT. The nurse at my doctor's office NEVER had a problem finding and inserting, completely painlessly. Then, some other tech did an unnecessary test. I told him I refuse, but he insisted. Guess who got charged for it? That was another big fight. The evening was nightmarish, at best.

Then came gall-bladder removal day. At this point, I was dreading being a patient in the house of horrors. The nurse there also seemed to have no experience finding veins and inserting the IV. She stabbed three or four times until she finally was semi-successful. After the surgery, the doctor came by and asked me if I had walked around yet. I said no. He insisted I do. I told him to take the IV out first. I was eating fine and perfectly hydrated. We argued a few minutes until he finally acquiesced to my request (that means he said yes...). What a RELIEF!!! Oh, and at the time I was taking medication for insulin resistance (which is not Diabetes), and they tried to give me INSULIN!!! What, were they TRYING to kill me?!

Here's my point. This hospital is a Mickey Mouse operation. It is run badly. The staff is horrible. They charge WAY too freaking much (like all hospitals...). And the care is well below competent. And a little person can complain all he or she wants, to no avail. After all, how can you complain about one of the top ten hospitals in the United States?!

Well, it took screwing up with the children of a movie star, Dennis Quaid, to bring all this to light and for the California Department of Public Health to issue a twenty-page deficiency report. But even this wasn't good enough. It issued a report specifically about the Quaid screw-up, not anything else. See the article here.

Why is it that when someone famous gets messed up because of a hospital, there's trouble, but not for the rest of us?

The healthcare system in this country is completely broken. It's not OK. It's not sufficient. It's not average. It's below bad. It's completely broken and there is no state or federal regulation that will oversee its rehabilitation into something at least acceptable. And it seems that if you are not a powerful or famous person, you have no recourse when something goes wrong.