IS THIS HAPPENING IN YOUR STATE?
submitted by a Tennessee resident
(Jul. 11, 2011) — HCA is a major health-care provider which was founded in Tennessee in 1968 by Dr. Thomas Frist. The Post & Email has confirmed that former U.S. Senator Bill Frist, who is also a medical doctor, is the grandson of Dr. Thomas Frist and had a financial interest in HCA until 2005, when he sold all of his shares. Mr. Richard M. Bracken is chairman and CEO.
Having expanded in the 1970s and ’80s, HCA now consists of hundreds of hospitals as a multi-state operation. According to Wikipedia, the corporation was raided in 1997 and brought up on felony charges, pleading guilty to 14 felonies. HCA reportedly admitted to ” fraudulently billing Medicare and other health programs by inflating the seriousness of diagnoses and to giving doctors partnerships in company hospitals as a kickback for the doctors referring patients to HCA” as well as other serious infractions. There have been civil lawsuits costing the company settlements of more than $2 billion.
HCA operates the TriStar Health System in Tennessee, parts of Kentucky and northern Georgia.
HCA’s “Current Fact Sheet” states:
Above all else, we are committed to the care and improvement of human life. In recognition of this commitment, we strive to deliver high quality, cost effective health care in the communities we serve. In pursuit of our mission, we believe the following value statements are essential and timeless:
- We recognize and affirm the unique and intrinsic worth of each individual.
- We treat all those we serve with compassion and kindness.
- We act with absolute honesty, integrity and fairness in the way we conduct our business and the way we live our lives.
- We trust our colleagues as valuable members of our healthcare team and pledge to treat one another with loyalty, respect and dignity.
HCA has continued to acquire more hospitals into its network and has recently been identified as one of the “World’s Most Ethical Companies.”
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I am writing you concerning a very serious matter and hope that you will be able to help in any way possible, even by simply working on an article that details the frightening corruption that is going on in Tennessee concerning the malpractice laws. Basically, the laws were made by the doctors; Bill Frist made sure they were passed to protect his empire, and now the people of Tennessee are at the mercy of these rogue doctors, who are basically given a license to kill, all the while knowing they will not be held accountable for their actions.
From what I have come to learn, there seems to be a network of criminal doctors who are working in the HCA-owned hospitals, and they are purposely lying to patients whom they decide are expendable and diagnosing these trusting victims with all types of serious illnesses and putting them through hell with unnecessary lab work and operations, and once they are done…. they are euthanizing these patients to cover up their lies and crimes while billing Medicare and other insurance companies tons of cash — all based on lies and murder.
I have never seen this type of evil and corruption in all my life, and nothing is being done about it. Please take the time to look over the malpractice laws in the state of Tennessee and you will get a better idea of what I’m talking about. HCA has the malpractice lawyers in their pockets, the judges, the doctors, the funeral homes — even the medical examiner’s office. This is how they are making their millions — off the blood of the innocent patients who walk through their doors in need of medical attention. The insurance fraud never stopped and last July 10th they murdered my mother and have thus far gotten away with it.
The attorneys where we live will not take our case out of fear. One of them told my father and me that the doctors and HCA are too powerful and so they set up the laws their way and it is nearly impossible to stop them. Since you are given only a year from the date of death to sue the hospital or doctors and it is nearly impossible to get an attorney to represent your case, the time usually goes by, and HCA wins time and again.
On May 9th, finally an attorney took our case because we needed a court order to get my mother’s body exhumed for an autopsy. All of Mom’s other medical records show she had healthy lungs, yet they claimed she died of lung cancer. The doctors altered her medical records with lies and even went so far as to put on her death certificate that she got lung cancer due to a history of cigarette addiction. My mother never smoked a day in her life. Anyway, after paying this so-called attorney a thousand dollars to get the court order for my mother’s autopsy along with ordering the Parafin blocks from the pathology department of the hospital, plus fixing the lies on my mother’s death certificate, the attorney did nothing at all and never filed anything even though she claimed she had, and the judge refused to sign it. Now we have learned that her real job was to stall us until the time to sue the hospital had ended. She never filed anything nor did anything. She basically stole my thousand dollars and did nothing to earn it. All were lies, deceptive lies from some of the most cruel and unconscionable persons I have ever encountered in all my life.
Thank goodness that the attorney my father and I visited recently told us about a loophole for more time. This man was scared to even tell us and did not want it to be known he had told us…this is how bad things are here, yet the media is not concerned. They bombard us with what Lindsay Lohan is up to yet do not tell the public about the dangers surrounding them. I contacted CNN and other media outlets but no one cared or even responded.
My father and I need your help. We are all alone in this, and I cannot simply sit back and do nothing after what they did to my mother. The doctors set up her murder in a separate part of the hospital and lied to us as to why she was being transferred there. They then had a patient transporter lie to us and say he was my mother’s nurse when in fact he was not a nurse, and then he overdosed her with Demerol and then called to tell us the bad news. They kept us in the hospital room with Mom’s dead body for almost four hours because they insisted we had to find a funeral home to come and get her. When we started asking questions, the patient transporter was immediately sent off on a five-week vacation, something that is unheard of in that hospital.
All I want now is an autopsy to prove what I already know to be true — yet I don’t know how to write up a court order and dad and I cannot trust the attorneys or medical examiners here. They are all part of the same network of crime and fraud. They did the same thing to our neighbor, but she didn’t fight them since it is so hard… but I am going to continue fighting these killers until the whole world knows what is going on around here. I will not let my mother’s death be in vain, not if other lives may be able to be saved by making the public aware.
HCA is powerful and criminal! This company is not simply committing insurance fraud but also murder! So many are currently in their graves based on lies, and all so that Bill Frist and his family and friends may continue making lots of money.
Please help me? An article on the subject matter — anything! I am reaching out to all those whom I admire and support in the hopes that they will support me and help me to bring these criminals with a license to murder to trial. All I ask is that you look into the vast corruption in the state of Tennessee, examine HCA and its hospitals more carefully, and then decide based on your findings if this is a topic you would like to discuss in an article. This is all I ask of you.
Thank you for your time. I am at my wits’ end and don’t know what to do. My father is elderly and I am permanently disabled. However, I will never stop trying to hold HCA accountable for the actions of its doctors and hospital. For the full 25 days my mother was at Centennial Medical Center, no doctor met with us even one time. They hid and lied from day one to the very end. Once we decided to take her out of there as opposed to allowing them to put her in THEIR hospice, the murder was set up, she was injected with something in her stomach, and she was dead five days later when the patient transporter, a man with an arrest record disguised as a nurse, carried out the execution on behalf of the doctors. This man had full use of that area of the hospital, almost as though he was the big boss. And even while we waited with mother’s dead body, no doctor ever talked with us.
This is a serious matter and lives are being cut short for profit. HCA MUST be stopped! They even have the cops on their side. When we tried to have the cops investigate, daddy and I were told that we needed an attorney before they could investigate anything. Can you imagine this?
Thank you for your time. I hope that you will read my letter and do whatever you can to help my father and me. Even an article on the subject would be help enough. HCA is hubris at the highest level and a danger to many.
Update, July 11, 2011: The following message was received in response to the above, which was published earlier today:
I worked at Centennial Medical Center in the MSICU from October 2004-12-2005, and then worked at another Tristar Hospital until Dec 2008. At NO TIME did I ever see anything that could be called euthanasia. In fact, I saw many things done to prolong a life that were futile. I know it is easy to call HCA the “Evil Empire” but before you go barking up this tree you should do some more fact checking. I worked with many dedicated physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists ETC. Just because someone has a less than optimal outcome does not mean a hospital is trying to kill people.