New York Medical Malpractice

High medical malpractice premiums have forced a Brooklyn hospital to completely shutter their obstetrics ward, which currently staffs 350 people. Long Island College Hospital in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn has taken on roughly $170 million in debt with 33% of that coming from the obstetrics department which has higher malpractice premiums than most others.

In New York, doctors and hospitals pay malpractice insurance premiums that are among the costliest nationwide. Last year, following a 14% rate increase, Governor Spitzer charged a task force with investigating and addressing the state’s high medical malpractice costs. The group did not produce a final report, and earlier this month, instead of raising rates again, the state’s Superintendent of Insurance, Eric Dinallo, announced a delay in the setting of new rates to give lawmakers time to address the situation.

"The bottom line is, I’m not surprised that one major hospital that does a significant number of deliveries is discontinuing their obstetrics service," the executive director of the New York chapter of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Donna Montalto, said. "That speaks volumes to the maternity crisis."

Many believe this move will send patients to competitor Beth Israel.

Newsweek highlights the issues plaguing the psychiatric hospital system that lead to the death of Brooklyn resident Esmin Green.  According to the article, poor handling of patients and extreme wait times were not uncommon in what is known as the G Building at Kings County Hospital, including the falsifying of documents to hide massive overcrowding issues.

On June 18, as Green waited for help, the American College of Emergency Physicians released a nationwide survey of emergency-room directors. More than 80 percent of them said psychiatric patients should be placed in dedicated emergency psychiatric facilities, like the ones New York established in the late 1980s. The G Building at Kings County, where Green died, was the city’s largest such facility. But if her story tells us anything, it’s that isolating psychiatric patients from everyone else will not solve the problem. In New York, at least, this approach seems only to have fostered an environment conducive to abuse and neglect.

The incident involving Ms. Green has resulted in immediate reform at Kings County Hospital, but is it enough to make the necessary changes in similar facilities around the country?

Much has been said in the blawgosphere recently regarding the negligent death of Esmin Green as she waited to be treated at Kings County Hospital. Ms. Green, a Brooklyn resident, had been waiting over 24 hours to be treated when she collapsed to the floor and was unattended to for over an hour. Several staff members of the hospital were caught on surveillance tape walking right past the woman even as she was laying unconscious on the ground. When she was finally attended to, she was pronounced dead.

This fascinating portrait of a Brooklyn, N.Y., hospital is about much more than white coats and beeping consoles – it’s 21st-century America in a microcosm.

A new book, Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God and Diversity on Steroids, captures the whole spectrum of factors that determine what kind of medical care people receive in this country.

Respect – or rather, the lack of it – may be the single most persistent theme in “Hospital.” It’s hard to say that respect matters more to the people at Maimonides than money, because in this market economy, money is increasingly the only way we measure worth. A former chair of orthopedics says that he fell out with Brier because he wanted to give priority in the waiting rooms to patients who paid out of pocket or who had full insurance: “People who pay for health care don’t want to sit in a room with fifty people. They want to be seen in a timely manner. I think that’s very reasonable.”