I Am Not Legally Allowed To Say I Am the Best Florida Lawyer

Ask a doctor’s office to hand over a complete copy of your medical records and watch them demur, citing state laws and vague hospital policies. Jamie Heywood, featured in October’s issue of Wired magazine, wants such obstacles legislated out of existence. He’s on a quest to make medical records as easy to access as ordering a pizza.

Heywood is behind HealthDataRights.org, a movement to declare individual rights to have and share health data. He believes the reason hospitals guard medicals records so closely is that they don’t want to be second-guessed by patients and lawyers. And that lack of openness, he argues, is making people sicker. By having access to health data in a timely manner, better health decisions will be made and lives will be saved.

While most everyone agrees that getting doctors to convert paper health records to a digital system makes sense, not many doctors and hospitals have made the transition. The national goal is to make electronic medical records available to everyone by 2013.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed early this year, includes $35 billion in incentives for doctors and hospitals to adopt computerized records.

But, only about 10 percent of hospitals and 20 percent of doctors’ offices are fully digitized now, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “We have a very long way to go in a very short time,” she added.

Electronic medical records will transform the practice of medicine, Sebelius said October 6th at the Cerner Health Conference in Kansas City. They will improve the way we provide health care and how we pay for it, both essential components of health care reform.

Physicians could pull up lab data, scans, medical allergies, and other key information on the spot, regardless of whether a patient is visiting a regular physician or on an emergency room operating table.

About one in five patients discharged from the hospital wind up hospitalized again within 30 days, often because they lack adequate follow-up care. Computerization will allow doctors to track their patients’ progress more efficiently, Sebelius said.

Most hospitals have no financial incentive to create electronic records, says Ashish Jha of the Harvard School of Public Health. Electronic medical records don’t increase the amount that insurance companies reimburse hospitals for care.

In some ways, inefficient hospitals – which perform duplicate X-rays when the first set can’t be found – can actually make more money, because they charge for each new test, Jha says.

Along with incentives, the Department of Health and Human Services is developing standards for electronic records, so that hospitals and doctors will be able to exchange information. These standards and incentives may finally give hospitals the push they need, experts say.

Did You Know?
The country could eliminate 200,000 drug mistakes and save $1 billion a year if doctors in all hospitals entered their orders on computers, according to a 2005 study in Health Affairs.
Doctors and hospitals that convert to electronic records can receive bonus payments from Medicare and Medicaid beginning in 2011; those not using them by 2015 will face penalties.

There’s a new movement gaining momentum that casts doubts on the scientific evidence behind “shaken baby syndrome.” Medical and legal practitioners are begining to ask whether it is actually possible to shake a baby to death.

Shaken baby syndrome is usually diagnosed in the absence of physical signs of child abuse like bruises, cuts and broken bones. However, even without those symptoms, babies arrive at the emergency room with bleeding at the back of the eye, brain swelling and bleeding. This set of symptoms is often diagnosed as shaken baby syndrome and attributed to an adult vigorously shaking the baby.

Experts said that those three symptoms could only occur as the result of a shaking that produced forces equal to those of a car crash at speeds of 25-40 mph or a fall from a three story building. Some recent research using devices similar to crash test dummies suggests that aggressive shaking only produces injuries equal to those suffered in a 2-to 3-foot fall.

Reason and Discover magazine have published interesting articles about this growing group who are suspicious of shaken baby syndrome.

Insurance companies are some of the most unscrupulous and unethical corporations in existence. I just learned of two stories presented before recent Congressional hearings on healthcare reform that are representative of the intolerable behavior insurance companies regularly engage in.

Rescission is the term health insurance companies use for their practice of dropping you after you’ve encountered catastrophic injury or disease by finding chickenshit errors in your paperwork that they can use to justify canceling your policy.

WellPoint health insurance actually gave scores on a 1 to 5 scale in employee evaluations to encourage the practice. One underwriting executive saved Wellpoint $10 million for doing such a good job screwing people over.

How many of you reading this have Florida Blue Cross Blue Shield? Well BCBS rescinded Robin Beaton’s insurance last year after she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. Blue Cross said this was because she had neglected to state on her forms that she had been treated previously … for acne.

WTF? indeed.

However, under some state laws the practice is legal if done within the allowable time frame (typically up to two years after a policy is issued).

Fortis Insurance Co. rescinded Otto Raddatz’s health insurance after he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma because Raddatz did not include in his paperwork a prior CT scan showing an aneurysm and gall stones.

The kicker … Not only had Raddatz’s docter  never told Raddatz about the results, but they were “very minor” and didn’t require treatment.

The outcome? Fortis refused coverage until the state attorney general intervened. The delay caused Raddatz’s window of opportunity to treat the disease to shut, and he died.

I’m not saying the current healthcare reform package is the best answer to our healthcare disaster … but it does outlaw recission.

(If you’re short on time, skip to the last paragraph for a paradigm shifting experience)

Your freedom ends where it begins to impinge on my freedom. It’s one of the pilars of our legal system. You are free to do many, many things in America. But when the freedom our laws provide to you begin to impinge on the freedom our laws provide to me, that’s where you’re not free to act any more.

For example, drink as much alcohol as you want. You are free to do so if you’re older than 21. There is no legal limit to the amount of alcohol you can drink. That’s one of the freedoms our law provides to you.

However, the second you drink to much alcohol and get behind the wheel of a vehicle, you’re impinging on my freedoms, on my rights to a safe road and perhaps even life and the pursuit of happiness. So that’s where your freedom to drink ends.

Two recent articles in the New York Times have addressed the practice of using cell phones while driving and text messaging while driving. You don’t need studies to tell you that these practices are dangerous. You see it every day, but one study is particularly illuminating.

It found that in braking tests at 70 mph, drivers with a blood-alcohol level of .08 (legally drunk in Florida), stopped four feet further down the road than sober drivers while texting drivers stopped 70 further than they should have.

Texting and driving is significantly more dangerous than drinking and driving. I’m tired of moving over in my lane to avoid swerving texters. I’m tired of being held up in traffic by people on their phones going 10 mph below the speed limit because they’re distracted. It’s time to outlaw this practice and make our roads safer.

The problem, according to one of the NY Times pieces is that while everyone recognizes the danger, they don’t think they are part of the problem so they continue driving distractedly. The article cited studies showing that the same people who complained about phones distracting drivers rated themselves as being safe drivers even while using a phone in their car.

The absurdity of the public’s opinion on this is readily apparent, but sadly not at all surprising. Nearly everyone rates themselves as being of above average intelligence, but if everyone were above average, who would be below. We tend to see ourselves more favorably than we really are.

So that’s the most important problem – we don’t think we’re the problem so we’re unlikely to give up our supposed “right” to text while driving. But it’s not your right – you are not free to drive distracted because it impinges on my freedom.

Another problem as today’s Times points out is that our own government is covering up evidence that cell phones are dangerous instruments when used in a car. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration caved in to Congressional pressure and withheld hundreds of pages of research and warnings about the use of phones by drivers.

The outrageous of this is so grandiose that I’m saving it for another blog post entirely. For now, I’m addressing problem one only. Get off your high horse. While you may be of above average intellignce, there’s no way you’re a safe driver while you’re on your cell phone and especially while you’re texting.

For years I was one of those people who thought I was different – safe. I would complain about drivers distracted by cell phones but I would still text and drive. Then in another post here I describe my transition away from texting and driving. What I found was surprising and holds far-reaching consequences for our perceptions and in particular, road rage. When I stopped texting and driving, I limited my texting to times when I was stopped at a red light. I found that on my 25-minute drive to and from work everyday, I was never stopped at a red light long enough to type an intelligible text. I could get one word at a red light, but never more than three. Try this sometime and it will change your perception of how much time you spend in traffic. It’s not much.

In an update to my previous post, a state judge ruled that an illiterate 13-year-old boy does not have the right to refuse chemotherapy, in part because he only has a “rudimentary understanding at best of the risks and benefits of chemotherapy. … he does not believe he is ill currently. The fact is that he is very ill currently.”

The judge did not remove Daniel from his parents’ custody but required that they proceed with medical evaluations to determine whether chemo is the best course of action

The judge said that if the boy’s prognosis remains good, the judge will require chemo, but if the cancer is too advanced, then he will not.

If the boy and his family refuse judge-ordered chemo, then the boy will be removed from his parents’ custody. The judge did not comment on what result would follow if the boy physicall fought the administration of the drug.

A Minnesota court case raises a fundamental question regarding the balance of individual liberty and governmental power. The case requires the presiding judge to decide whether a 13-year-old boy and his family can refuse chemotherapy treatment for his cancer or whether the government can force him to receive the treatment against his will.

Daniel Hauser has Hodgkin’s lymphoma and his doctors say chemotherapy will give him a 90 percent chance of survival. Without it, they say he will die.

However, Daniel and his parents want to treat his cancer with nutritional supplements and alternative treatments promoted by the Nemenhah Band,which advocates natural healing methods used by some Native Americans.

“This is about the right of a 13-year-old young man to be free from acts of assault on his body,” said the family’s attorney, Calvin Johnson.

Daniel was diagnosed with cancer this January. A week later, Daniel had to visit an emergency room due to a severe illness. At that time, the family consented to his first and only chemo treatment to date.

However, Daniel became depressed after his chemo treatment and decided he did not want to continue them.

When Daniel’s doctor notified child protection authorities, the county Daniel lives in brought charges against the family to require Daniel to submit to treatment.

What do you think readers?

Which party has a stronger interest in its rights? Does the boy and his family have a stronger interest in living (and dying) as they so choose or does the government have such a strong interest in this matter that it would be justified in forcing him to undergo and invasive, painful and lengthy treatment?

The Florida Bar is known as perhaps the most aggressive and strict bar association in the country in regards to lawyer advertising. Florida lawyers have sued the Bar several times for violating their First Amendment free speech rights.

In a welcome turn, the Bar has backed off of one of its numerous absurd advertising rules. Lawyers are now allowed to use the word “trust” in our advertising.

The Florida Bar prohibits lawyers from describing the quality of our services. For example, we can’t say we’re great lawyers. I’ve opined a little on that at this I Am Not Legally Allowed To Say I Am the Best Florida Lawyer Blog post.

For some time, the bar prohibited lawyers from using the word trust in advertisments because the bar considered that to describe the quality of a lawyers service. What they forgot is that lawyers are required to be trustworthy.

We are bound by our oath and by the bar’s code of legal ethics to maintain lawyer/client confidentiality. Let’s review the logic of this one: the bar requires us to be trustworthy and then forbids us from telling the public that we’re trustworthy.

I’m glad to see this rule taken off the books.

The Florida Supreme Court disbarred a Florida lawyer Thursday for letting a female client pay for legal services by having sex with him.

James Harvey Tipler had earlier pled guilty to solicitation to prostitution in his criminal case. Tipler agreed to let his client, an 18-year-old woman,  reduce her $2,300 fee for her assault case.

Every time he had sex with her, Tipler would reduce his fee $200. Every time she arranged for another girl to have sex with him, Tipler would reduce her fee by $400.

Tipler also altered evidence in the case against him and persuaded a witness to falsify testimony.

As if our reputation wasn’t already bad enough.

What type of behavior is child neglect and what is not? It’s a question of where we draw the line as a society.

Lack of supervision is one of the legal definitions of child neglect. However, we are left to decide for ourselves to what degree someone must fail to supervise a child before we say they broke the law.

WESH TV2.com is reporting that two children in Volusia County called 911 after their mother left them home alone.

The headline described the 6 and 4-year-old children as “panicked” but the 911 call transcript does not lead me to the same conclusion. It reveals the 6-year-old boy saying, “when we were freaked out, I told my sister, ‘You need to go to sleep and stay calm until tomorrow. I think she’s coming back.”

That seems pretty level-headed and calm to me. Is that headline another example of media sensationalism to drum up their audience? I digress.

The topic of this post is to discuss legal line drawing. The boy in this story called 911 at about 2 a.m. and said he was home alone with his 4-year-old sister.

The operator talked to the boy after asking him to turn on the TV to entertain his younger sister. Volusia County Sheriff’s Deputies arrived to supervise the children until their 23-year-old mother, Megan Hester, returned home 30 minutes later.

She said she went to a convenience store to fill up her car with gas and that when she left, the children were sleeping. Deputies reported that she did not seem drunk or otherwise intoxicated, the house was clean and the children were fine.

She was arrested and charged with felony child neglect.

In this post I will not take one side or the other but encourage you to comment on where you would draw the line between behavior that is imprudent versus behavior that is criminal. Where would you draw the line?

I’ve blogged about highway deaths before and I’ll surely blog about them again after this. They almost all remind me about the importance of under/uninsured motorist coverage. Most of the car accidents I read about are caused by someone driving very recklessly and those people don’t strike me as the kind who are likely to buy adequate insurance to protect you.

This most recent Daytona interstate accident occurred yesterday on I-95. Pamela Reid of Palm Coast actually caused two separate accidents. The first occurred on U.S. 1 and no one was hurt. That was just shortly before she caused the fatal I-95 crash.

Reid crossed the median on I-95 and crashed head-on into a 2003 Chevy. The wreck spun the car and caused it to roll, ejecting both occupants. Bruce Castle, 42, of Port Orange was killed and Trevor Luce, 34, of Palm Coast was critically injured. Reid was seriously injured.

An investigation is ongoing and charges are pending. Troopers believe Reid was under the influence of alcohol when the crashes occurred.

If Reid does not have insurance or does not have adequate insurance, I pray that Luce has under/uninsured motorist coverage or he will be looking at a hefty bill once he recovers. More people are forced into bankruptcy from medical bills than any other reason. The right insurance coverage can save you from the same fate.

I wish Luce a speedy recovery, and hope he has adequate insurance. If not, there may be one way he can recover from Reid. See my previous blog  Tragic Highway Death Sober Reminder of Importance of Underinsured Motorist Coverage to learn more.