Patients' Bill Of Rights: Senate Bill Flawed
-- Establish a wholly inadequate enforcement mechanism that prevents patients from holding health plans accountable when they make harmful decisions. The new legal analysis released today concludes that the liability provisions in the Senate bill would preempt state law, effectively wiping out accountability protections that many states like Missouri have passed and would replace it with:
-- A new "bad faith" standard that is virtually impossible to prove and is a much higher standard of proof than any medical malpractice standard applied to physicians and other health care professionals. This is the usual standard applied for punitive damages - not economic and non-economic remedies;
-- A requirement for plaintiffs to show that "substantial harm" resulted from the plan's action, and in so doing, would effectively exclude chronic conditions that did not meet this standard; and
-- A massive loophole that protects plans from liability for damages at all if a self-insured plan contains other types of benefit options - as most currently do.
President Clinton has stated he will not sign this legislation into law.
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To consumers and my professional colleagues, this entire issue represents much of what puts our industry in the crises we are in today - big, very profitable corporations trying to protect their profits at the expense of both the consumers and professional providers of health care in the U.S.
Not mentioned in the press release is the Senate's total lack of regard as to who provides care in medical institutions, the impending nursing shortage crisis and some plan to make professional nursing the only standard of bedside care offered to patients.
Featured recently on major television shows, is it safe to leave your loved one alone in the hospital? Quite frankly I think not in most cases. Our family is comprised of two professional nurses and neither of us would leave the other or either of our children alone. Why? Because you can't be sure the nurse taking care of you is even a nurse! As I mentioned in an article some months ago, many facilities are using unlicensed assistive personnel (UAPs). They may have different names in different institutions, but one thing is constant - they are practicing nursing without the benefit of a nurse's training.
These techs lack the training
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