You might think that spending ten years on the street, two of them at 6th and Mission, might mean that a person is a hopeless case. If you're thinking that way, even secretly in your mind, as you pass people huddled under urine-soaked gray-felted blankets, then now's the time for you to meet
Last week Antidote introduced you to Dr. Steven Balt, the rare physician to have the courage to open up about his personal experiences with the physician discipline system. The first part of our interview was posted last week. The last part is below.
When I wrote in 2009 about the death of the Medical Board of California’s diversion program, some medical board staffers expressed disbelief that I would say anything nice about a program that had been so controversial.
Medicare’s new consumer information site, Physician Compare, promises the same gold mine of data patients find when they use Hospital Compare or Nursing Home Compare. But, unlike those sites, Physician Compare does not keep its promises.
Although Doctors Behaving Badly tends to focus on exactly what you would expect, its mission is to make people aware of the many ways that patients are left unprotected.
There are nearly 1 million licensed, practicing physicians nationwide. Antidote has no ability to count how many are “behaving badly,” but it is safe to say that only a slim minority are tainting the reputation of the medical community. Doctors who abuse, injure or kill patients are the surrogate markers for an illness in the physician discipline system. They are not the illness.
Medical boards from coast to coast are inconsistent, inefficient and ill equipped to monitor the hundreds of thousands of doctors licensed under their watch, Antidote’s investigation of every state board has found. There are some standouts, but, overall, they do a terrible job protecting patients and informing the public.
It bears repeating that most doctors do a great job and are focused on one thing: helping their patients heal and lead healthier lives. The mission of this tour was to explore what happens to that minority of doctors who don’t follow the rules.
The final state in Antidote’s Doctors Behaving Badly tour of state medical boards should have been Wyoming.
How did William Hamman, the United Airlines pilot who faked being a cardiologist, get away with it? By speaking with authority and knowing that nobody was going to bother to fact-check his résumé, including the Wisconsin Medical Examining Board.
Blue Cross of California awards $69 million in bonuses to in-state physican groups.
