Are Non-Hospital Surgery Centers Safe?

Health Wellness

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Over the past few decades, the cost of healthcare has continued to climb higher and higher. Many working-class Americans not only fear getting sick or hurt for obvious reasons, but also because of the cost, which can quickly bankrupt a family and cost them everything including their home.

Fortunately, for many working people, their employer offers some kind of healthcare coverage but the cost to the employer has also skyrocketed. One employer I had reported that their employer cost for the same coverage had increased by 41% from one year to the next, and many employers just can’t afford to pay such high premiums and end up passing part of the cost increase on to their employees. The sad part is that many employees couldn’t afford the increases either are were faced with having healthcare coverage and not paying other bills or paying other bills and going without healthcare coverage and praying nothing serious happens.

The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was sold to the American people with the promise that it would make healthcare more affordable for everything, but that was just a lie to get us to drink their socialist Kool-Aid. Under Obamacare, the cost of healthcare continued to skyrocket. Some areas of the country saw annual increases as much as 70%, forcing many employers and employees to drop their coverage.

In response to the continued rise in the cost of healthcare, urgent care centers and clinics began opening. Additionally, a number of non-hospital surgery centers also opened up. Some of these were in with doctor offices and others were stand alone surgery centers designed to offer a variety of medical treatments at lower costs than what hospitals charge.

A recent report on the news said that there were more surgery centers than there were hospitals in the United States and there is a growing concern that these surgery centers pose one of the same dangers that many abortion clinics experience. When a complication arises, and they do, there is often no one there who is qualified to handle it and the patient has to be transported by ambulance to a hospital, which in some cases is too late, like Paulina Tam.

She went into a surgery center to have spine surgery. The doctor said she was doing fine and he went home. Only four-hours later, Tam was gasping for air and none of the nurses on duty had a clue as to what to do, so one of them ended up calling an ambulance. By the time the ambulance arrived and got Tam to the nearest hospital, she was dead. The 58-year-old mother of three had bled so much internally from the surgery that it made it to hard to breathe, but by the time she was seen in the hospital, it was too late. In all likelihood, had she had her surgery in the hospital to begin with, the staff would have been able to address her complication immediately and save her life.

What happened to Tam is not an isolated case, but a trend that seems to be increasing and causing some concern among medical professionals and prompted an investigation by Kaiser Health News and USA Today Network. On the surface, they found that there had been over 260 patient deaths since 2013 from procedures performed in surgery centers. They studied over 12,000 state and Medicare inspection records, legal filing, autopsy records and interviews patients, health policy experts and doctors. From their investigation, they reported:

  • Surgery centers have steadily expanded their business by taking on increasingly risky surgeries. At least 14 patients have died after complex spinal surgeries like those that federal regulators at Medicare recently approved for surgery centers. Even as the risks of doing such surgeries off a hospital campus can be great, so is the reward. Doctors who own a share of the center can earn their own fee and a cut of the facility’s fee, a meaningful sum for operations that can cost $100,000 or more.
  • To protect patients, Medicare requires surgery centers to line up a local hospital to take their patients when emergencies arise. In rural areas, centers can be 15 or more miles away. Even when the hospital is close, 20 to 30 minutes can pass between a 911 call and arrival at an ER.
  • Some surgery centers are accused of overlooking high-risk health problems and treat patients who experts say should be operated on only in hospitals, if at all. At least 25 people with underlying medical conditions have left surgery centers and died within minutes or days. They include an Ohio woman with out-of-control blood pressure, a 49-year-old West Virginia man awaiting a heart transplant and several children with sleep apnea.
  • Some surgery centers risk patient lives by skimping on training or lifesaving equipment. Others have sent patients home before they were fully recovered. On their drives home, shocked family members in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Georgia discovered their loved ones were not asleep but on the verge of death. Surgery centers have been criticized in cases where staff didn’t have the tools to open a difficult airway or skills to save a patient from bleeding to death.

Don’t get them wrong, they say that the majority of surgeries performed in these surgery centers go smoothly with good results, but there is that inherent danger that persists when complications develop. Resolving many of these complications depends on how soon doctors can get to the patient and when surgery center staff panic and try to figure out what to do and they call for an ambulance, the ambulance arrives and transports the patient to the hospital, it’s too late, as in the case of Paulina Tam.

They urge caution before undergoing any procedure at a non-hospital surgery center. Do some research. Find out if they have a contract with a nearby hospital in case of complications. Ask questions and if you are not satisfied with the answer or have doubts, you may want to pay the extra cost to have your procedure performed at the hospital instead. Your life may depend on it.

Safety surgery Urgent Care

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