Take a look at WHICH hospital this occured at. Mountain View is owned by HCA, one of the largest FOR PROFIT hospital chains in the country. As a former HCA employee I can tell you that HCA does not care about patient safety, they only care about profit. Thats why their CEO took home an $11 billion bonus in 2006. Have people already forgotten that HCA was involved in the biggest Medicare/Medicaid fraud in history? Isn't it amazing they are still allowed to accept Medicaid payments? Any other corporation convicted of Medicaid fraud would no longer be eligible for reimbursement, but HCA can. Don't let the name fool you, HCA and Columbia are one in the same. They just put a new dress on after the scandal and pretended to hire a new CEO to clean up the organization. Funny thing is, the "new" CEO had been there all along and was aware of the Medicaid fraud. Now for another thing you may not know, Mr. Frist from HCA has a brother, you may have heard of him, former US senator Bill Frist? It helps to have relatives in high places. Bill Frist was in office during the time period that HCA was allowed by the federal govt. to accept Medicare fraud charges under a different corporate name so that HCA hospitals would still be eligible for Medicaid reimbursement. Make no mistake, HCA is a corporate model. Other businesses look up to them, when asked how they made their bottom line so pretty they proudly exclaimed "by cutting employee salaries and benefits!" Before I left that wretched organization, we were asked to no longer refer to people as patients, but instead "customers". Thats fine for a business model, but these are HUMAN BEINGS LIVES!!! What I found most despicable was that on nurses annual performance evaluation they were rated on taking a higher load of patients consistently. If you have ever read any published studies on hospital outcomes you will know that the more patients a nurse is responsible for, the greater the risk of death/morbidity for the patient. HCA knows this and yet they still try to get by with as few nurses as possible, all under a "money saving" guise. The truth is that the nurses consistently work short so that the CEO's can maintain their lifestyles. And beware going to HCA on a weekend or in the middle of the night because in an effort to save (earn) more money the staffing cuts are most deep at those times. I do not doubt that other hospital chains are as money hungry as HCA, but HCA in my opinion is the most shady. Most people don't even know that a hospital is owned by them because they don't put HCA in the facility name. They don't want people to know they are the same HCA who defrauded Medicaid.
My heart goes out to the Scheinbaum family. I hope they will find justice. Hopefully this case will bring to light the unethical business practices of HCA, but I am sure they will try to offer a settlement to sweep everything under the rug. Maybe another name change is in store for HCA.