Olga Pierce and Marshall Allen at ProPublica write
The Two Things That Rarely Happen After a Medical Mistake:
Patients who suffer injuries, infections or mistakes during medical care rarely get an acknowledgment or apology, researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine report.
The study was based on responses of 236 patients who completed ProPublica's Patient Harm Questionnaire during the one-year period ending in May 2013 and who agreed to share their data. […] The study found:
• When officials did disclose harm it was often because they were forced to. Nine percent of respondents said the harm was only acknowledged under pressure.
• Apologies were infrequent. Only 11 percent of patients or their family members reported getting an apology from a provider.
• More than 30 percent reported paying bills related to the harm. The average cost: $14,024.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Does Grift Really Need a New Name?:
To put you in the right mood for coming up with the proper neologism, [Yves] Smith includes a chilling one-minute A Clockwork Orange-style scene from the ultra-violent 1992 Australian cult film Romper Stomper, which gives a rather sharper meaning to Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein’s remark about "doing God’s work." Says one of the film’s skinhead home invaders to the owner: "We’re here to wreck everything and ruin your life. God sent us."
Now, of course, I’d not be so crude as to suggest that Mr. Blankfein and the other vampire squids of finance set out with the overt intention of wrecking and ruining anybody’s life. They were bent merely upon enriching themselves at the private (and subsequently the public) trough under the motto beloved by ruling-class operatives throughout the ages: Devil take the hindmost.
Nonetheless, a new word or two might be in order to commemorate one of the world’s grandest rip-offs since Castile plundered Mexico and Peru of their silver four centuries ago, as well as a new name for the thieves themselves. Thieves, it should be pointed out, who so far have been neither penalized for inflicting their damage nor constrained from doing it again.
Thanks to the language’s gluing of words together, German and pseudo-German words frequently got the thumbs-up on the Naked Capitalism thread. And out of this emerged my two favorites, finanzheist, courtesy of a commenter named El Ror, and Bob’s elegant fuckincrookin. And there’s Yiddish, with its gentle but accurate fermisht (turned upside-down).
Tweet of the Day
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show: A wild GunFAIL weekend.
Greg Dworkin reexamines the mental illness/gun violence link, and Adam Lanza's treatment. Short honeymoon for Congressional Gop. Republicans in disarray. Why millennials don't think everyone should vote.
Armando on the Hagel resignation. The big GunFAIL round-up. Benghazi! Congress eyes new DC pot law. NJ shifts cops from guarding child welfare workers to save on overtime, moves them to guarding an empty Ebola quarantine site, and meanwhile a child welfare worker is attacked & stabbed in her office.
High Impact Posts. Top Comments