Power of Doctors is Eroding… Grady Death Sentence is Arriving

Neil Shulman MD gave a talk at a recent Emory Cardiology Research Conference about the plight of the Grady Hospital dialysis patients. (Read all of the posts about Grady dialysis here). A year ago, we the Grady patients received a death sentence after the board of directors decided to close the dialysis clinic and told the patients to go back to their countries or bugger off in general. In conjunction with the Advocates for Responsible Care we filed the patients into the board rooms and subsequent court hearings filed by Lindsay Jones on behalf of the patients. With some effort we got them to provide a year of treatment through the private clinic Fresenius, but now their time is up on August 31. At the conference one of the doctors said that the power of doctors is eroding, and increasingly it is the situation where administrators tell the doctors what to do with their patients. Funny, I didn’t think they should have the power to do that, but what the hey…

Meanwhile, at least one woman went back to Mexico, where she died because she couldn’t get dialysis, another went to Florida and almost died, then came back to Georgia, and there are several other stories like that. There still are 33 patients who need dialysis who are still alive who will be affected.

Meanwhile, the CEO of Grady, Michael Young, got a $300,000 bonus for saving money at Grady, which is the priority these days.

Pete Correll is former CEO of Georgia Pacific who runs the board of Grady. 

Pete Correll

Baxter sells supplies for dialysis and charges twice as much for the dialysis supplies here as it does in Mexico. Maybe we should smuggle some over the border. We are asking Fresenius, DaVita, and Emory to provide compassionate care for these patients.  Robert J Parkinson, Jr, is president and CEO of Baxter.

Robert J Parkinson, Jr

 Kent J Thiry is CEO of DaVita, a dialysis company which has recently come under scrutiny for milking the use of the drug Epogen in dialysis patients for treatment of anemia.

Kent Thiry

Thomas Lawley MD is the Dean of the Emory Schoo of Medicine and is on the Grady Board. I have gone to the meetings but he usually just sits there and doesn’t say anything. Emory supposedly has picked up a few patients but they could do more to get these other harbingers of corporate greed to do something.

Thomas Lawley MD

Ben J. Lipps, PhD, is the CEO of Fresenius who is the largest provider of dialysis in the US. They pay Lipps $4,310,000 a year in salary and compensation each year. (Maybe he could donate some to dialysis patients) Although Fresenius is a German company, they have adopted well to the American system of putting profits over people when it comes to healthcare. If a situation like the Atlanta dialysis situation occured in their home country, the local population wouldn’t stand for it.

Dr. Ben J. Lipps

The problem is that medical decision making is slowly being taken away from the doctors and put into the hands of people who don’t have the experience of connecting with people about their healthcare. Witness how administrators at Grady asked the doctors there to sign a statement saying that it would be fine for dialysis patients to get their dialysis only through the ER and on an as needed basis. They refused.

If each of these entitities would take on a few charity cases, like they used to in the old days, the problem would be solved.

Note: the post was updated one day after the initial posting.

See this article by UW-Seattle nephrologist Rudolph Rodriguez MD arguing that physicians have an ethical imperative to help these patients.