"Lest Anyone Doubt The Story Of Mary Johnson . . ."

Catching up, fellow doctor-blogger, Joe Guarino, no doubt furrowed some brows amongst the local "Coneheads" when he posted this ditty last Friday on a physician survey out of Texas.

Seventeen percent of physicians report cases in which physicians lost employment, contracts, or hospital privileges because they raised issues about hospital regulatory compliance or patient care quality.

I'm not very surprised by the findings - or the numbers.  In fact, based on my own experience - and all of the ugly I have seen in my years on-the-road, I would expect those numbers to be higher in North Carolina - where the big/non-profit hospitals rule broad swipes of the economic landscape. 

It's rare for medical badness to make headlines - and usually involves something really awful - like little girls transplanted the wrong hearts or babies used as bait for child abusers.  In these instances the outraged public will often wail, "How could this have happened?"

What is very disturbing (if not understandable because the legal and fiscal decks are stacked so highly against them) is that so few physicians fight back when this kind of thing happens.

That, and the fact that our so-called uber-powerful physician advocacy and patient safety organizations - like the N.C. Medical Board, and the Medical Society and JCAHO and the AMA have turned deaf ears and blind eyes to the problem.

Indeed, looking back on my stroll down the yellow-brick-road-from-Hell, the only reason I did not turn my back and leave Randolph Hospital behind in the dust where it belongs is because ASHEBORO IS MY HOME, and when it comes to the carpet-bagging/lying/thieving/double-dealing corpraturds runnig Randolph (Bob Morrison and Steve Eblin), I was here first. 

In terms of physicians suffering retaliation for blowing the whistle, the question begs, thirteen years after every dream I ever had was turned to crap in order to service their control-freak greed, and as North Carolina Republicans hastily ram healthcare/tort reforms through the legislature, WHAT IS THIS STATE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? 

When are the Harold Brubakers of this world going to STOP regurtitating sound-bites and start protecting patients - and the doctors brave enough to risk it all to advocate for them?