ETHICS IN MEDICINE ACT

"Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the

most shocking and most inhumane." --The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (1966).

AT STAKE: Billions of dollars and thousands of deaths documented

Ethical Medical decisions undermined by Bad Faith Peer Review (BFPR)

All over America today, Doctors’ careers are being ended unfairly by colleagues and hospital

administrators using Bad Faith Peer Review (BFPR).

STATEMENT

The bill has to improve the quality of medical carein the state of Viriginia through assisting physicians who have been subjected to malicious and improper (sham) peer-review. In many cases, these physician are not only the most talented but the most concerned with quality patient care.

Proper peer review is an essential system intended to protect patients. If peer

review is conducted in bad faith, patients and the public at large are defrauded

and left defenseless. Many documented cases of bad faith peer review have

been shown to greatly harm the public interest. This bill will alert the public, the health care environment, professional societies, academic institutions, government elected officers and General assembly, to the enormous threat that bad faith peer review poses. This bill will end bad-faith peer review and support integrity.

Doctors and lawyers who work in this area are impressed that the rate of wrongful bad

faith peer review is very high, regardless of exactly how high it is.

Verner Waite, MD, FACS, founder of the Semmelweis Society, personally reviewed

more than 1000 cases of physician peer-review, and determined that at least 80% (and

probably 90%) of peer reviews are performed in bad faith, for economic or other reasons.

At present, no standards or definitions exist to guide objective peer review.

• Bad faith peer review is a major current harm to the public.

1. Decreased safety leads to frequent prolonged illnesses and deaths.

2. 17% of the US GNP is now devoted to healthcare. Big Medicine uses bad faith peer

review to hide corruption with major costs. Cases in Virginia, Dallas(Texas), Tennessee, and in Atlanta show that billions of dollars and potentially thousands of lives are at risk.

3. Some of the most ethical and competent and scholarly physicians are driven out of the practice of medicine.

• Failure of current watchdogs.

1. HHS (Center for Quality health care services and consumer protection and Board of Medicine) does not use effective authority to enforce appropriate regulations on peer review.

BAD-FAITH PEER-REVIEW

WHY 100,000 PEOPLE DIE EVERY YEAR FROM MEDICAL ERRORS

Peer review is part of a system to protect patients. If this has been

warped, patients are at risk. We ask to improve medicine without

spending a dime. That is hard to beat with a stick.

The recent award of $366 million to a physician by a Federal Jury in Texas for a single

bad-faith peer-review highlights that this practice is adding tremendous cost to

healthcare. http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2004/10/04/prsd1004.htm

The recent use of bad-faith peer-review as an instrument to further widespread political

corruption in Virginia and Georgia shows the destructive nature of bad-faith peer-review, and the potential terrible consequences on the public.

http://www.geocities.com/ron_marshall21/DFOG.RTF

Georgia Senator Charles Walker has been indicted on 142 felony counts for stealing from

Georgia hospitals. His scheme used bad-faith peer review to silence any staff member

who spoke out. District Attorney Paul Howard covered up. The effects of this corruption

on Georgia are widespread.

At the same time, the medically incompetent, the advocates of continued poor-quality and the most financially driven are allowed to run our hospitals; all because the provisions of the Health Care Quality Improvement Act allow them to do so. And then we ask: why are 100,000 people dying every year from medical errors?

It’s because behind the smoke screen of every one physician targeted by sham peer review, there is a dozen physicians whose medical errors are quietly shoved under

the rug! Therein lies the real source of threat to public health, as well as the

injustice to those individual physicians who become sacrificial lambs.

The state of Pennsylvania recently passed the MCARE law, Medical Care

Availability and Reduction of Error Act; where each hospital is to have a public safety committee in which all serious events are to be reported.

What is truly alarming, disturbing and a fundamental negation of the tenets of peer review is the “Whistle-Blower” protection which states that if an individual feels the hospital is not addressing serious quality concerns, then that person should report his concerns directly to the State public safety committee. “the State government has a responsibility to provide leadership in

addressing the serious quality of care and safety concerns confronting

our nation.”.

http://www.aapsonline.org/resolutions/2004-1.htm

The resolution of the Pennsylvania Medical Society calls on the medical society to

"explore all aspects of sham (bad faith) peer review and explore ways to prevent the

misuse of peer review" including looking into "applicable laws and steps that can be

taken to protect physicians' rights to advocate for quality patient care." At least two other

state medical associations, in Oregon and California, have said they're looking into the

issue as well.

WHAT ABOUT OVERSIGHT?

Medical State Boards’ Inaction and Bad Faith Actions

State Boards of Medicine have uniformly refused to consider bad-faith peer review a

breach of the ethics of Medicine for reasons that are known to everyone. Physicians who

participate in bad-faith peer-review are usually friends of the Hospital administrators,

who in turn are friends of the State Governor, the Secretary of Health, Attorney General or the Executive Director of the Board of Medicine. The Virgina Board of medicine can be influenced by Attorneys and Hospitals.

http://www.virginiatimes.org

http://www.dhp.virginia.gov/Notices/Medicine/0119002161/0119002161Order11222004.

pdf

The physicians even went on to accuse the Board of Medicine of covering up for those

individuals because they are well connected to certain members of the Department of

Health. The Board of Medicine did not deny it in its response, and the Virginia Secretary

of Health declined to answer his letter. Reading material regarding board actions:

http://www.virginiatimes.org

http://www.courts.state.va.us/opinions/opncavtx/0016022.txt

http://www.saccourt.com/courtrooms/trulings/d25archives/2004/Dec10D25-

04CS00969.doc

The Concerned citizens of Virginia suggests the following remedies to General assembly.

Significant bad parts of the law remain however.

If one loses a peer review it is reported to the State Medical Board. The Boards are political appointees and objective tests are unknown. Lying is allowed in Virginia peer review law: “regardless of motivation it is absolutely immune”. The U.S. citizens have lost hundreds of doctors. The incompetent physicians are not competition so they are not “peer reviewed”. “why does the hospital pay these awards and not the unethical doctors guilty of the misdeeds? Are we taxpayers paying so hospitals stay open? How do you inhibit lying by not penalizing the liars?

RESOLUTION INTRODUCED BY “Concerned citizens of Virigina” ETHICS IN MEDICINE ACT

WHEREAS substantial evidence exists that peer-review in the Virginia is often conducted without adequate due process and in a manner unethical and harmful to

patients, medical competition and to doctors, and

WHEREAS bad-faith peer-review has resulted in substantial reduction in economic

competition in many areas of theVirigina, and

WHEREAS, bad-faith peer-review has in documented cases resulted in reduction in the

standard of care given to patients, and

WHEREAS bad-faith peer-review has deprived undeserved communities of doctors in

desperately needed subspecialties, and

WHEREAS a single award of $366 million to a single doctor for a single bad-faith peer review shows the urgent need for reform, the potential harm of the bad-faith peer-review

crisis now exceeds the harm of the anti-medicine tort crisis, and

WHEREAS bad-faith peer-review has been documented to gag doctors so that they are

unable to inform patients of medical options that are not in the financial interest of their

employer HMOs or other large medical organizations,

WHEREAS bad-faith peer-review is inconsistent with the practice of the Hippocratic

Oath and the requirement that a doctor practice solely for the good of his patient and to

do no harm, and

WHEREAS bad-faith peer-review has been documented in Congressional hearings as a

tool of HMOs’ to restrain doctors from speaking out as patient advocates, thereby directly

leading to patient deaths, and

WHEREAS bad-faith peer-review has become a tool to stop all medical professionals

from blowing the whistle on matters of vital importance to the community, and

WHEREAS bad-faith peer-review has been documented as a tool to further a scheme to

pay off the very top state officials (including the Senate Majority leader and Attorney General) of a two major Southern States and

WHEREAS, bad-faith peer-review has been used in RICO actions by organized criminals

to divert millions of stolen healthcare dollars from 17% of the US economy, and

WHEREAS, CQI is defined at www.aapsonline.org, and

WHEREAS, in some cases, such physician subsidies have already resulted in criminal

self-referral/fraud charges, as well as civil anti-trust charges, and

WHEREAS such physician subsidies can be used as leverage in patient care issues and

peer-review actions, creating an inherent conflict of interest, and

WHEREAS State may suspend or revoke any license or permit, or impose

probationary or other restrictions on any license or permit for "unprofessional conduct",

be it therefore

1. Doctors will receive due process as defined by professional review systems

already in place for other professions.

2. All decisions in peer review will be subject to appellate review.

3. All witnesses in peer review will receive qualified immunity. No one in any

review will receive unlimited immunity.

Emma Whitehead, Lloyd Hines, Adams Jackson,

Christopher White, Mr. Brown, Lokesh B. Vuyyuru, MD

Dorothy Taylor