Archive for the ‘health reform’ Category

An update for fans of the NHS

Friday, November 27th, 2015

NHS

I have posted a number of essays on what I think health reform should look like. None of it looks like the NHS. Now, we have new information about how the NHS is functioning.

Figures collected by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) over the last seven weeks showed 88 per cent of A&E patients were treated or admitted within four hours – seven per cent below the 95 per cent target.
The report said that hospitals are also experiencing major problems discharging patients who are medically fit to go home.
Hospitals in England are failing to meet the 95 per cent target of seeing patients within four hours

The problem is being exacerbated by ‘bed blocking’ – where a patients cannot leave because there is not the right support in place in the community – with about a fifth of hospital beds being occupied in some parts of the UK.
Experts say the increasing problems in social care are having a major impact on the NHS.

This is an old problem with free care. We used to have patients in County hospital who would heat thermometers with hot coffee to avoid being sent home. Some of them were mentally disturbed and I have one such story in my book, “War Stories; 50 years in Medicine.

The NHS is having troubles all over.

The data shows performance getting worse since hospitals began submitting the data at the start of October.
Then, just over 92 per cent of patients were seen in four hours, falling to 88 per cent in the middle of November.
More than 6,300 planned operations have been cancelled over the seven-week period.
As an overall average, each site cancelled 21 operations per week, ranging from no cancellations to 137 in a single week.
The Department of Health and NHS England used to publish weekly data for England on how A&E departments were performing but have now stopped doing so.
Instead, data is published monthly but only covers figures from more than a month ago.

Hiding bad news is an old tactic of bureaucracies.

The Coming Shortage of Doctors.

Monday, August 3rd, 2015

33 - Lister

This Brietbart article discusses the looming doctor shortage.

Lieb notes, that the U.S. is only seeing 350 new general surgeons a year. That is not even a replacement rate, she observed.

A few years ago, I was talking to a woman general surgeon in San Francisco who told me that she did not know a general surgeon under 50 years old. The “reformers” who designed Obamacare and the other new developments in medicine are, if they are MDs, not in practice and they are almost all in primary care specialties in academic settings. They know nothing about surgical specialties.

They assume that primary care will be delivered by nurse practitioners and physician assistants. They are probably correct as we see with the new Wal Mart primary care clinics.

The company has opened five primary care locations in South Carolina and Texas, and plans to open a sixth clinic in Palestine, Tex., on Friday and another six by the end of the year. The clinics, it says, can offer a broader range of services, like chronic disease management, than the 100 or so acute care clinics leased by hospital operators at Walmarts across the country. Unlike CVS or Walgreens, which also offer some similar services, or Costco, which offers eye care, Walmart is marketing itself as a primary medical provider.

This is all well and good. What happens when a patient comes in with a serious condition ?

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Metabolic Syndrome and Obesity.

Monday, July 20th, 2015

I spent an interesting day last Saturday at a USC post-graduate course on “premalignant lesions of the GI react.”

Part of the session discussed the question of obesity and diet. “Fatty liver” is a condition related to obesity and metabolic syndrome.

The Wikipedia definition includes.
1. abdominal (central) obesity,
2. elevated blood pressure,
3. elevated fasting plasma glucose,
4. high serum triglycerides, and
5. low high-density lipoprotein (HDL) levels

Central obesity is not the same as subcutaneous obesity, which is what we all think of. Titters out there is a racial factor with blacks more likely to have subcutaneous obesity without the central obesity involving the liver and internal organs.

Metabolic syndrome and prediabetes appear to be the same disorder, with insulin resistance as a major factor.

Other signs of metabolic syndrome include high blood pressure, decreased fasting serum HDL cholesterol, elevated fasting serum triglyceride level (VLDL triglyceride), impaired fasting glucose, insulin resistance, or prediabetes.

Associated conditions include:
1. hyperuricemia,
2. fatty liver (especially in concurrent obesity) progressing to
3. nonalcoholic fatty liver disease,a.so called NAFL
4. polycystic ovarian syndrome (in women),
5. erectile dysfunction (in men), and
6. acanthosis nigricans.

It is generally accepted that the current food environment contributes to the development of metabolic syndrome: our diet is mismatched with our biochemistry. Weight gain is associated with metabolic syndrome. Rather than total adiposity, the core clinical component of the syndrome is visceral and/or ectopic fat (i.e., fat in organs not designed for fat storage) whereas the principal metabolic abnormality is insulin resistance.

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Expensive babies.

Sunday, July 5th, 2015

Mila

There is a post on Instapundit today about expensive babies.

It references a new book about a premature baby and is named “Girl in Glass.”

That baby was referred to by the CEO of AOL in a speech to employees explaining why he was cutting benefits for all employees. Her care cost 1 million dollars. The Guardian article goes on to complain about US healthcare (of course) and the cost of premature baby care.

I have a somewhat similar story in my own new book, War Stories. My story is not about a premature baby, although I have one of those too, but a little boy who was born with a heart defect that caused an 18 month hospital stay at Childrens’ Hospital in Los Angeles.

Here it is:

Following my general surgical residency training, I spent an additional year training in pediatric heart surgery at Children’s Hospital. During this time I learned more about the amazing resiliency of children and their recovery from terrible illness. I was also reminded of the constant possibility of catastrophic error in medicine. One young patient named Chris was the best example of the tremendous recuperative powers of children. He was coming in for open-heart surgery to repair a large ventricular septal defect. The ventricles are separated by a muscular wall called the septum, which forms during early fetal development of the heart. The heart has four chambers, two atria and two ventricles, which are separated by walls called “septa,” plural of septum. There are a number of major cardiac anomalies associated with the development of the atrial and ventricular septa and also with the rotation of the heart and the connection of the great arteries to the ventricles from which they arise. Chris was born with a very large defect in the septum between the right and left ventricle. In this situation, the newborn goes into congestive heart failure very shortly after birth. The defect causes no trouble before birth because the lungs are not inflated and the blood flow through the lungs is very small. The cardiac circulation in utero consists of oxygenated blood returning from the placenta through the umbilical veins, passing in a shunt through the liver and then entering the right atrium, which also receives the non-oxygenated venous blood from the body. The oxygenated blood returning from the placenta enters the right atrium and passes through a normal atrial septal opening called “the foramen ovale,” which shunts it directly to the left atrium and left ventricle for circulation out to the body. This bypasses the lungs. The venous blood, and the umbilical vein oxygenated blood that does not go through the foramen ovale, enters the right ventricle where it is pumped into the pulmonary artery. There, because of the high pulmonary resistance it goes through another shunt, the ductus arteriosus, a connection between the pulmonary artery and the aorta, to bypass the lungs and circulate to the body. Minimal flow goes beyond the ductus into the pulmonary arteries until birth. During fetal life, the presence of a ventricular septal defect merely eases the task of shunting the oxygenated blood from the right side of the heart to the left and then out to the general circulation.

When the infant is delivered into the world from its mother’s uterus, it inflates its lungs and very rapidly major circulatory changes occur in the heart and lungs. The pulmonary arteries to the lungs, which during intrauterine life carry almost no blood because of a very high resistance to flow in the collapsed lungs, suddenly become a low resistance circuit with the inflation. The foramen ovale, which has a flap valve as a part of its normal structure, begins to close very quickly and the ductus arteriosus, connecting the pulmonary artery and the aorta, also closes within a matter of several hours. These two shunt closures are accomplished by hormonal changes associated with the changing physiology of the newborn. In very low birth weight preemies, that have low blood oxygen concentration due to immature lungs, the ductus often does not close. In the child with a ventricular septal defect, the sudden drop in resistance to flow in the pulmonary circulation together with the closing of the ductus arteriosus causes the shunt, which was directed from the right to the left heart in utero, to switch to a left to right shunt after birth. The pulmonary circulation is now the low resistance circuit and the systemic circulation; that is, the aorta going out to the arms, legs, and organs is now a relatively high resistance circuit. The flow in the pulmonary circuit goes up tremendously, a short circuit in effect, taxing the ability of the right ventricle to handle the load. At the same time circulation to the organs, the brain and the extremities, drops because of the shunt. This combination of circumstances produces acute congestive heart failure in a newborn. Cardiac output is huge but the flow is going around in a circle through the lungs and then back to the lungs.

Chris had a huge ventricular septal defect and as soon as his lungs inflated and the pulmonary circulation began to assume the normal low resistance of the newborn, he developed an enormous left to right shunt and went into heart failure. The venous return from the body entered his right atrium, passed into the right ventricle and on into the pulmonary artery to circulate through the lungs. Once the oxygenated blood returned to the left atrium on its way to the body, it was shunted back to the lungs because the pressure in the aorta and left ventricle was much higher than that in the right ventricle and pulmonary artery. The short circuit in the heart diverted almost all blood flow to the lungs and little went to the body. The right ventricle, which is thin walled and flat like a wallet, cannot handle the load and quickly fails. The treatment of an infant with a large ventricular septal defect and heart failure is to perform a temporary correction by placing a band around the pulmonary artery above the heart. This accomplishes two purposes. One, it artificially creates a high resistance and equalizes the pressure in the right and left ventricles so that the flow across the ventricular septal defect is minimized. The right ventricular pressure is as high as the left ventricular pressure and little or no shunt occurs. This stops the huge shunt and, with the smaller flow, the ventricle can handle the pressure. It also protects the lungs from high blood flow that damages the pulmonary circulation.

In a related anomaly called “Tetralogy of Fallot” a partial shunt occurs but it is the other way, right to left, since the pulmonary artery is severely narrowed at its origin as part of the anomaly. These children do not go into heart failure, but they are blue because of the mixture of venous blood from the right side and arterial blood from the left. Some patients with ventricular septal defect (VSD) do not go into heart failure because the shunt is not that large but if treatment is delayed and a continued high flow through the lungs persists, in later life they develop irreversible changes in the lungs from the damage to the pulmonary circulation by high flow rates. They become blue later as the increasing pulmonary resistance in the lungs reverses the shunt from left to right to right to left as in Tetrology of Fallot. This condition is called “Eisenmenger’s Complex” and, once it occurs, cannot be corrected. Once this reversal occurs they do not benefit from correction and require heart and lung transplantation. Some VSDs are small and do not produce enough flow to cause trouble, at least in childhood.

Chris had a pulmonary artery banding procedure at about two or three days of life and an extremely stormy course for a very long time postop. He was in the Intensive Care Unit at Children’s Hospital for over a year. He had a tracheostomy for much of that time as he was unable to breathe without a respirator for a year. He had intravenous feeding for well over a year. During this time he had several cardiac arrests and the staff became convinced that he would be brain damaged if he survived. Finally, after 18 months in Children’s Hospital, he went home. This had all occurred before my time. Now, 3 years later, he was being admitted for the definitive repair of his heart defect. The pulmonary band is Teflon tape and does not grow so the pulmonary stenosis, which had saved his life, was now a threat, as it did not permit adequate flow to his growing lungs. He was five years old and was joyously normal. His intellectual development, in spite of everything, was normal and he was a very calm and self-confident little kid. He was not afraid of the hospital or of us, the white coat brigade. Most nurses and staff in children’s hospitals and pediatric clinics avoid white coats preferring colorful smocks to reassure kids that we are all regular folks. The kids are not fooled but it does seem to defuse the tension, especially at first. When we would make rounds on the ward for the few days Chris was in the hospital for pre-op checks, he would go around with us. He wore his little bathrobe and sometimes carried charts for us. He was completely unafraid. I don’t know if it was because he remembered his previous experience; I didn’t think that memory would be very reassuring.

Anyway, the day of surgery came. His mother was a nervous wreck because she had come so close to losing him and here they were risking him again. I did not see much of the family on the day of surgery. His grandfather was a famous movie star, one of the biggest box office leaders of all time, and the hospital had thrown a big luncheon bash for the family as they waited. We heard about it and grumbled that they could have spent the money on a better blood bank (we were having trouble getting blood for elective cases), but no doubt they hoped for a big donation. The surgery, itself, was almost an anticlimax. The data from the original heart cath, when he was a newborn, suggested that he had almost no interventricular septum and we anticipated trouble reconstructing a new septum. As it turned out, his heart, in its growth during the past five years, had developed a good septum with a modest sized defect in the usual place. It was easy to patch and the surgery went well. The other worry with VSDs is the conduction system, the Bundle of His, which carries the electrical stimulation to the ventricles, and runs right along the edge of the defect but this was not a problem. There was no sign of heart block after the sutures were placed and tied. Postop we always took the kids straight to the Heart Room, a combination recovery room and ICU. The nurses there knew more about cardiology than I did and probably more than anyone else at Children’s below the rank of associate professor. His mother came in and stood at his bedside for a while just thankful to have him. I never saw the rest of the family although I did meet his father before he went home. He recovered quickly and completely. I had one more encounter with him about a year later.

After his recovery from the heart surgery he had another operation, this time on his leg. He had been in the hospital for so long as a baby with an IV line in his groin that his hip would not straighten out completely. A few months after the heart surgery he had another operation to release that contracture, the scar that had formed limiting his hip movement. It also went well but had been postponed until his heart was fixed. A couple of months after that procedure he was well enough to climb trees. I know that because he fell out of one of them and cut his forehead requiring several stitches. I removed the stitches in the office a couple of months after I started practice in Burbank. He recovered completely and is now an executive in the entertainment business. I have not seen him since 1972.

I don’t know what Chris’s care cost but I think it was worth it. AOL was foolish to self-insure and not buy reinsurance for catastrophic cases like Chris and Mila’s. There are ways to reform health care and to cut costs but they are not what AOL did or what Obamacare did.

Obamacare Lives !

Thursday, June 25th, 2015

UPDATE: The decision is analyzed at Powerline today with quotes for the decision.

The Affordable Care Act contains more than a few examples of inartful drafting. (To cite just one, the Act creates three separate Section 1563s. See 124 Stat. 270, 911, 912.) Several features of the Act’s passage contributed to that unfortunate reality. Congress wrote key parts of the Act behind closed doors, rather than through “the traditional legislative process.” Cannan, A Legislative History of the Affordable Care Act: How Legislative Procedure Shapes Legislative History, 105 L. Lib. J. 131, 163 (2013). And Congress passed much of the Act using a complicated budgetary procedure known as “reconciliation,” which limited opportunities for debate and amendment, and bypassed the Senate’s normal 60-vote filibuster requirement. Id., at 159–167.

Therefore, Roberts rewrote it. Nice !

Today, the Supreme Court upheld the Obamacare state exchange subsidies.

The Supreme Court has justified the contempt held for the American people by Jonathan Gruber. He was widely quoted as saying that the “stupidity of the American people “ was a feature of the Obamacare debate. This does not bother the left one whit.

Like my counterparts, I have relied heavily on Gruber’s expertise over the years and have come to know him very well. He’s served as an explainer of basic economic concepts, he’s delivered data at my request, and he’s even published articles here at the New Republic. My feelings about Gruber, in other words, are not that of a distant observer. They are, for better or worse, the views of somebody who holds him and his work in high esteem.

The New Republic is fine with him and his concepts.

It’s possible that Gruber offered informal advice along the way, particularly when it came to positions he held strongly—like his well-known and sometimes controversial preference for a strong individual mandate. Paul Starr, the Princeton sociologist and highly regarded policy expert, once called the mandate Gruber’s “baby.” He didn’t mean it charitably.

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Why Doctors Quit.

Friday, May 29th, 2015

Today, Charles Krauthammer has an excellent column on the electronic medical record. He has not been in practice for many years but he is obviously talking to other physicians. It is a subject much discussed in medical circles these days.

It’s one thing to say we need to improve quality. But what does that really mean? Defining healthcare quality can be a challenging task, but there are frameworks out there that help us better understand the concept of healthcare quality. One of these was put forth by the Institute of Medicine in their landmark report, Crossing the Quality Chasm. The report describes six domains that encompass quality. According to them, high-quality care is:

1) Safe: Avoids injuries to patients from care intended to help them
2) Equitable: Doesn’t vary because of personal characteristics
3) Patient-centered: Is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs and values
4) Timely: Reduces waits and potentially harmful delays
5) Efficient: Avoids waste of equipment, supplies, ideas and energy
6) Effective: Services are based on scientific knowledge to all who could benefit, and it accomplishes what it sets out to accomplish

In 1994, I moved to New Hampshire and obtained a Master’s Degree in “Evaluative Clinical Sciences” to learn how to measure, and hopefully improve, medical quality. I had been working around this for years, serving on the Medicare Peer Review Organization for California and serving in several positions in organized medicine.

I spent a few years trying to work with the system, with a medical school for example, and finally gave up. A friend of mine had set up a medical group for managed care called CAPPCare, which was to be a Preferred Provider Organization when California set up “managed care.” It is now a meaningless hospital adjunct. In 1995, he told me, “Mike you are two years too early. Nobody cares about quality.” Two years later, we had lunch again and he laughed and said “You are still too years too early.”

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Obamacare = Medicaid

Friday, May 8th, 2015

emergency

I have been interested in health care reform for some time and have proposed a plan for reform. It is now too late for such a reform as Obamacare has engaged the political apparatus and sides have been taken. The Obamacare rollout was worse than anticipated and it was hoped that the Supreme Court would have mercy on the country, but that didn’t happen and it has been the law for two years.

What has it accomplished ? Well, the forecast drop in ER visits hasn’t happened. It also didn’t happen in Massachusetts when that plan took effect.

Wasn’t Obamacare supposed to solve the problem of people going to the ER for routine medical problems? We were told that if everyone had “healthcare” — either through the ACA exchanges or through Medicaid expansion — people would be able to go to their family doctors for routine care and emergency rooms would no longer be overrun by individuals who aren’t actually experiencing emergencies.

As it turns out, Medicaid patients can’t get appointments with physicians.

“America has severe primary care physician shortages, and many physicians will not accept Medicaid patients because Medicaid pays so inadequately,” said Michael Gerardi, MD, FAAP, FACEP, president of the ACEP.

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Gruber’s lies.

Wednesday, December 10th, 2014

The left does not do economics. They do politics and elections and lying to get past the “stupid voters” but, when pressed, nothing they do qualifies as numerically or mathematically sound. Social Security worked until everyone found the queue and until Congress raided the trust fund in the 90s.

Obama and the Democrat leaders knew that Hillary made enemies of the insurance companies in 1992. The insurance companies funded devastating TV ads with “Harry and Louise” that cost the Democrats Congress in 1994. Therefore, they had to do what was necessary to get the insurance companies “inside the tent pissing out and not outside the tent pissing in” in Lyndon Johnson’s immortal words.

Insurance companies have considered health insurance a loser for 25 years now. What they prefer is becoming “Administrative Service Organizations” which administer self funded health plans by employers.

Corporate benefits include- organizing/ negotiating health insurance, group dental, STD, LTD, life, etc.

The plan the Democrats came up with, with Gruber’s help, was to make the government the funding entity and pay the insurance companies to run the program. That way everybody is happy, except, of course, the taxpayer. The taxpayer does not like tax increases which would be needed to pay the bills. Therefore the taxpayer has to be fooled.

The excise tax on high-cost health plans was among the many fees and taxes proposed as offsets to help slow the rate of growth of health costs, particularly premium growth, and finance the nationwide expansion of health coverage. When the Affordable Care Act was signed into law in March 2010, its coverage provisions were estimated to cost more than $900 billion over the next decade, from 2010 to 2019, and were to be paid for by fees and taxes on both individuals and businesses. At the time the health reform bill passed, the excise tax on high-cost plans was estimated to raise roughly $32 billion in revenue over the next decade, or by 2019.

Without the taxes to pay the bills, the whole plan collapses. At its base, Obamacare is Medicaid for everyone. The employer mandate has been, contrary to the text of the law, postponed as the flaws in implementation appear. If it were to be enforced, there would be a revolution. The funding from employee plans is called “The Cadillac Tax which is an excise tax on employer plans that exceed the benefits of Medicaid.

As health coverage expands to tens of millions of Americans–through Medicaid expansion in states and the new state health insurance exchanges that will soon begin selling individual health coverage–some Americans with employer-sponsored health coverage are seeing their benefits decrease.

One of the most significant, and controversial, provisions of the Affordable Care Act is the new excise tax on high-cost health plans proposed to both slow the rate of growth of health costs and finance the expansion of health coverage. The provision is often called the “Cadillac” tax because it targets so-called Cadillac health plans that provide workers the most generous level of health benefits. These high-end health plans’ premiums are paid for mostly by employers. They also have low, if any, deductibles and little cost sharing for employees.

If this is ever implemented, the Medicaid-for-all nature of Obamacare will become obvious. That’s why it will not happen. The fundamental premise behind Obamacare is not viable. That is why it will fail and the numbers do not add up.

Gruber can’t say this. All he can do is obfuscate.

Medicaid for All

Saturday, November 1st, 2014

My concept of Obamacare has been that it is a transition period to a single payer that will be Medicaid for everybody. Belmont Club (Richard Fernandez) seems to agree.

One of most fascinating things about the failure of Obamacare is it has occasioned the rise of private exchanges, which are now on track to completely dwarf the public Healthcare.gov exchanges. Obamacare is becoming Medicaid for all. That is where all their expansion is coming from, the metal plans it offers, not so much.

The abolition of employer-provided insurance has led companies to simply give workers money to purchase their own health care on a private exchange. Urgent care clinics are booming because they charge much less than Obamacare network prices when a policy holder has not yet reached his deductible. What is repealing Obamacare is that people are working around it, according to their preference. Vermont, for example, is creating a single payer health care system. The Left approves, but it is a rejection of Obamacare just the same.

Thus, private money offsets legal tender. Private security replaces public safety. Private armies replace the United States Armed Forces. Private exchanges replace public exchanges. In the end, only the poor will be left with the public stuff.

I have been of this opinion since the beginning.

At least 2.9 million Americans who signed up for Medicaid coverage as part of the health care overhaul have not had their applications processed, with some paperwork sitting in queues since last fall, according to a 50-state survey by CQ Roll Call.

Those delays — due to technological snags with enrollment websites, bureaucratic tangles at state Medicaid programs and a surge of applicants — betray Barack Obama’s promise to expand access to health care for some of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

As a result, some low-income people are being prevented from accessing benefits they are legally entitled to receive. Those who face delays may instead put off doctors appointments and lose access to their medicines, complicating their medical conditions and increasing the eventual cost to U.S. taxpayers.

Democratic lawmakers who have promoted the law’s historic coverage expansion are wary of acknowledging problems that hand opponents of the Affordable Care Act another rhetorical weapon, said Robert Blendon, a professor at Harvard University School of Public Health and Kennedy School of Government.

That was a year ago.

What now ? The Heritage Foundation has a post about the Medicaid expansion that is Obamacare.

Heritage research shows 40 of 50 states would see increases in costs due the Medicaid expansion. If all states expand, state spending on Medicaid would increase by an estimated $41 billion by 2022.

The costs are being shifted to the states. Will that work ?

Analysis by Heritage shows that by 2022 any projected state savings are dwarfed by costs. Moreover, these projected savings assume states will further reduce payments to hospitals and clinics for uncompensated care. But, as Heritage’s Ed Haislmaier points out, it is more likely that hospitals will lobby state legislatures for more money rather than less.

It all depends on cutting reimbursement to providers. Is that likely to increase access for anyone ?

What it will do is shift those who can afford to pay into a parallel system of cash clinics and practices, Which I have predicted.

There have been other suggestions but it is unlikely that any great reform would be tolerated now after the failure of the Democrats’ attempt.

Instead, I think the Republican Congress should pass legislation to make Obamacare voluntary and let the ,market works things out.

New developments at Mission Hospital

Wednesday, October 15th, 2014

A few months ago, I described the hospital where I used to practice and what was happening there recently.

Now, we have some new developments.

A couple more years went by and I learned that the hospital had laid off the low wage “environmental services” workers who cleaned the operating rooms between cases. Nurses, who made three or four times the hourly wage of the cleaning staff were now expected to clean rooms between cases in addition to their other duties.

That practice continued and now has caused severe problems. Last week, I learned that the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals had visited the hospital and had withdrawn the accreditation from Surgery, Labor and Delivery and Cardiology services. These are the heart of the acute care hospital. The reason ? Let’s read the paper.

From todays Orange County Register.

All elective surgeries at Mission Hospital, the third-largest hospital in Orange County, are on hold after four patients who underwent orthopedic operations developed infections.

The hospital opted to close its 14 operating rooms in Mission Viejo and Laguna Beach last week after a major accrediting agency, The Joint Commission, intervened and found, among other problems, high temperatures and humidity in some of the rooms, according to Chief Medical Officer Dr. Linda Sieglen.

If those infections were in patients undergoing total joint replacements, they are disasters for those patients. The cost of laying off those room cleaners has finally come home.

The scandal, and that is what it should be, is deeper than that story suggests. Surgeries are being shifted to other hospitals and doctors are going to have to make changes in their practices. Relationships may change permanently.

It is frustrating and infuriating to see the great hospital we built up in the 1970s, reduced to a news story about poor care as the result of ignorant and corrupt administrators.