Wait for it...
Bain Capital, stuffing Mitt's pockets with more filthy lucre.
You see, hospitals provide services and procedures to Medicare patients and then bill the government. Perform more tests and you get to bill for more money, more profits, which result in big fate paydays and possibly Willard's $100 million IRA.
That patients who don't need the procedure could actually DIE mattered not a bit to these greedy vampire bastards.
Just let me put the Times last paragraph first to illustrate this better: "HCA has more than 100 catheterization labs across the country and the one at Lawnwood was a financial juggernaut. It accounted for 35 percent of the hospital’s net profits, according to financial documents."
[In a follow-up interview, the nurse said a doctor at the Lawnwood Regional Medical Center, in the small coastal city of Fort Pierce, had been performing heart procedures on patients who did not need them, putting their lives at risk.
“It bothered me,” the nurse, C. T. Tomlinson, said in a telephone interview. “I’m a registered nurse. I care about my patients.”
In less than two months, an internal investigation by HCA concluded the nurse was right.
“The allegations related to unnecessary procedures being performed in the cath lab are substantiated,” according to a confidential memo written by a company ethics officer, Stephen Johnson, and reviewed by The New York Times.
Mr. Tomlinson’s contract was not renewed, a move that Mr. Johnson said in the memo was in retaliation for his complaints...
The need to root out Medicare fraud — billing for unnecessary procedures, for example — is high for all hospitals. In 2003, Tenet Healthcare agreed to pay $54 million to settle allegations that unnecessary cardiac procedures were being performed over six years and billed to Medicare and Medicaid at one of its hospitals in California, Redding Medical Center.
But the pressure is even greater for HCA. In 2000, the company reached one of a series of settlements involving a huge Medicare fraud case with the Justice Department that would eventually come to $1.7 billion in fines and repayments. The accusations, which primarily involved overbilling, occurred when Rick Scott, now the governor of Florida, was the company’s chief executive. He was removed from the post by the board but was never personally accused of wrongdoing.{Bullshit, Governor 48.9$ never faced criminal charges but whistleblowers said he knew of violations}...
Late in 2003, executives from HCA’s headquarters in Nashville dispatched a group that oversees its hospitals’ cardiac care to investigate. In a confidential memo, the team cited incidents at Bayonet Point where patients were treated for multiple lesions, or blockages, even when “the second lesion (or third) did not appear to have significant disease.” The team went on to note “several cases” in which patients were treated even though their arteries did not have significant blockages.
In a transcript of confidential hearings held later, the lawyers for HCA were blunt. In looking at one physician, Dr. Sudhir Agarwal, Dr. Martin I. Kalish, a physician who served as an outside lawyer for HCA, said the “style of clinical practice leads to unnecessary procedures and unnecessary complications.”
On the team’s recommendation, HCA brought in an external company, CardioQual Associates of Franklin, Mich., in 2004 to examine medical records from Bayonet Point.
In a confidential memo prepared in December 2004 and reviewed by The Times, CardioQual concluded that as many as 43 percent of 355 angioplasty cases, where doctors performed invasive procedures to open up a patient’s arteries, were outside reasonable and expected medical practice.
Worse, the investigation revealed that some physicians had indicated in medical records that the patients had blockages of 80 to 90 percent when a later, more scientific analysis of a sampling of cases revealed the blockages had ranged from 33 to 53 percent.
Cardiologists generally do not operate on any blockage less than 70 percent, said Dr. Rita Redberg, a prominent cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. ..
Cardiology is a lucrative business for HCA, and the profits from testing and performing heart surgeries played a critical role in the company’s bottom line in recent years.
Some of HCA’s busiest Florida hospitals perform thousands of stent procedures each year. Medicare reimburses hospitals about $10,000 for a cardiac stent and about $3,000 for a diagnostic catheterization.
But in recent years, doctors across the country have been less quick to implant stents, instead relying on drugs to treat blockages. Medicare has also questioned the need for patients who receive cardiac stents to stay overnight at the hospital, cutting into the profitability of the procedures at many hospitals.
HCA has more than 100 catheterization labs across the country and the one at Lawnwood was a financial juggernaut. It accounted for 35 percent of the hospital’s net profits, according to financial documents.]
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