This is indeed a scary story. The commenting on the original post at the link is pretty detailed too, once you get past the usual “she was overweight and it was her fault” and “this is Obama care” at work. It is interesting that you see those types of comments all over the web and they really 
don’t mean anything, especially to the context of this story. This is a sad situation that began before reform and do you come back that harsh and say it was her fault as she was overweight? Anyway just something I felt that needed addressing since you see so much of that crap on the web with blame shifting that can’t even seem to get close to the at least shifting the blame in the right direction. Nobody deserved this nightmare.
The hospital admits that they do harm to around 700 patients a year and there are no specifics on the exact type of harm in this article so there could be a lot of areas covered outside of surgery included here. They did a study though and said 74% of the outcomes with harming patients could have been avoided. The case in this story though is a nightmare as she started out with knee surgery that had a mistake made by a resident surgeon and the nightmare builds and continues from there to where she finally has her leg amputated after staph, removing the knee and several other procedures are tried.
Her employee health insurance made the care virtually free as long as she had the surgery at Parkland, so not much choice there for surgical procedures. A cardiovascular surgeon finally made the diagnosis that her surgery been "complicated" by a "high-grade injury" to the artery behind her knee.
Parkland Memorial Hospital, by its own calculation, seriously harms two patients a day. Jessie Mae Ned was one of them. Legal actions are difficult and patients have a hard time finding an attorney who will take the legal suit as the litigation time is tremendous and there has not been a malpractice case I believe since 2008 actually filed.
The one item here that really bothers me about this whole situation is the fact that at least the hospital could get her a prosthetic leg for goodness sakes! This is a long fully documented article here and get I hope I don’t read another nightmare like this one for quite a while. BD
She entered Parkland's operating room in 2008 with private insurance and no major health problems except arthritis in her knee. She left a destitute amputee after 24 surgeries in 16 months and $1 million in billings to Medicaid.
"I went from being a person who could pay all my bills to nothing," said Ned, a former Parkland employee. "All I do is beg."
"We harm two patients a day in a significant way," says the report by Parkland's patient safety officer, Dr. Angelique Ramirez. It covers patients from October 2008 through December 2009 who suffered "prolongation of hospital stay, need for ICU care, permanent harm, or death."
Jessie Mae Ned spent almost 28 years working in Parkland's housekeeping department, mostly scrubbing floors and toilets before taking on supervisory duties. She was just 51 and on no daily medications when arthritis crippled her left knee.
But the hospital hasn't been meeting with all the people it harms, the report says, noting that at least 20 percent of the most serious cases had not been disclosed.
"Parkland maintains the confidentiality of peer review, root cause analysis and associated processes and documents as required by law," the disclosure policy says.
Hospital officials also told Ned that they would again alter records related to her termination, to show that her employment didn't end until the first surgery disabled her. That made her eligible for a higher level of benefits and a retroactive payment of about $18,000.
Parkland has said nothing about compensating Ned for harm, she said. No lawyers would take her case: "They said Parkland keeps them tied up in litigation too long."
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