Sunday, June 21, 2009

Taking Care Of The Veterans

Er, not so much. The federal government, in their frantic & stupid attempt to save money & privatize everything, learned nothing from Blackwater's brutal incompetence. Now, we have a surgeon who doesn't know a prostate from a bladder. So much for providing state of the art care at a VA hospital. & of course, no one is in jail, Dr. Kao still has a job.
For patients with prostate cancer, it is a common surgical procedure: a doctor implants dozens of radioactive seeds to attack the disease. But when Dr. Gary D. Kao treated one patient at the veterans’ hospital in Philadelphia, his aim was more than a little off. The Rev. Ricardo Flippin, preaching at a Baptist church in Charleston, W.Va., had severe pain and later found out he had a radiation injury. Most of the seeds, 40 in all, landed in the patient’s healthy bladder, not the prostate. It was a serious mistake, and under federal rules, regulators investigated. But Dr. Kao, with their consent, made his mistake all but disappear. He simply rewrote his surgical plan to match the number of seeds in the prostate, investigators said.
*****

The V.A. put too much trust in the contractors,**
said Darrell G. Wiedeman, a senior health physicist for the nuclear commission. “They claim they hired experts, the best that money could buy from the local university, so therefore they didn’t require a lot of training and oversight,” Mr. Wiedeman said at a recent meeting of the nuclear commission’s advisory board.

My emphasis. **Sound familiar?

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