Two Riverside County hospitals face the prospect of Medicare sending its patients elsewhere, which will likely leave the hospitals too poor to operate or open a gleaming new unit.
We reported as much Tuesday. But the question remains: How often does Medicare level the ultimate punishment on hospitals for lapses in care?
Not often at all, it turns out.
At California Watch’s request, federal Medicare officials provided a list of hospitals that have been involuntarily “decertified,” (in other words they lost their funding), since 2000. The total comes to 31 nationwide and five in California, a state with more than 450 hospitals.
More on those in a jiffy, but first, here’s a review of what’s been going on in Riverside County. The scrutiny falls on two hospitals operated by Southwest Healthcare System, which runs Rancho Springs Medical Center, in Murrieta, and Inland Valley Medical Center, in Wildomar.
In recent years, state health authorities have levied $25,000 fines against the hospitals on three occasions: for food-storage failures, for inadequate intensive care staffing and for failing to have doctors on call to treat emergency room patients.
What’s more, a Medicare survey made public in December revealed that one hospital left newborns at risk for jaundice and left a man with Down’s Syndrome in restraints for 21 days, according to the Riverside Press Enterprise.
Medicare authorities in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco are now poring over three more recent – and not yet public – reports to decide the hospitals’ fate.
Medicare's ultimate punishment was most publicly dispensed in 2007 against Martin Luther King Hospital in Los Angeles and carefully documented by LA Times reporters. A December 2008 article details one case that reportedly spurred officials to defund that hospital:
Edith Rodriguez was captured on security videotape as a janitor mopped around her and a triage nurse dismissed her complaints in the early morning of May 9, 2007.
…A federal report issued last year concluded that six staff members, including a nurse and two nursing assistants, saw or walked past Rodriguez but did nothing.
She died from a perforated bowel shortly after she was arrested on an outstanding warrant instead of being treated.
A more recent case shows, though, that it doesn't take a nationally broadcast tragedy for Medicare to drop the hammer. In 2008, regulators took funding away from Kindred Hospital in Modesto after problems reported by the Modesto Bee:
Kindred Modesto came under scrutiny after the January 2007 death of a 44-year-old paraplegic man who got trapped in the side rails of his bed and died from asphyxiation. Government inspectors found in May that the hospital had failed to make corrections to ensure that other patients did not become entrapped in bed rails.
The hospital was also hit with $75,000 in fines from state health regulators for problems with medication errors and failing to keep track of narcotic drugs.
The remaining hospitals involuntarily edged out of the Medicare program, in California and throughout the U.S., are on this list provided by the agency.
Oh, and if I've scared you about deadly hospital care, the California Healthcare Foundation has compiled a great resource for the public to see how their local hospital has performed on numerous types of routine care, from heart surgery to caring for patients with pneumonia.
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