Either that, or Bethany Carson bought a load of sh*t from them so deep that all of Riley's couldn't pump it out...
On the FRONT PAGE of today's H&R (tornadoes ripping through Iowa rated page 5, and several stories on Medicare part D made it to other sections altogether,) another installment of the DMH propaganda machine gets slapped together and spewed out for the unsuspecting masses to take as gospel.
H&R, Ms. Carson, do you actually check all your sources before you print, or do you just print what Smithmier tells you to? To help you see the gross negligence perpetrated in today's H&R, let me set the record straight:
ERROR #1To compare DMH with Carle is like comparing Hervey City with Chicago. Decatur has about 90,000 with a few stragglers coming in from outlying communities. We don't have all those large corporate donors. DMH does NOT have the specialties nor is it a TRAUMA CENTER that Carle is!!! Carle has dozens of branches in SEVERAL TOWNS around that feed it's hospitalist/specialty admissions team!!! To say implicitly that DMH and Carle are on par with each other is plain negligent, and VERY MISLEADING!!!
ERROR #2DMH hospitalists, by the very description you gave in your article, could in NO WAY give better or quicker treatment than any other family doctor. Why? My family physician KNOWS ME, as Dr. Cavanagh pointed out, and for DMH hospitalists to offer BETTER CARE than my family doctor is
A SLAP IN THE FACE OF THE BIGGEST MAJORITY OF FAMILY PHYSICIANS IN DECATUR WHO DO NOT USE HOSPITALISTS AND DO NOT AGREE WITH THE DMH PARTY LINE!!!!!!!!!! The time a patient spends in the hospital depends NOT ON THE DOCTOR, but on the quickness of tests performed, the availability of specialists, and the schedule maintained by other supportive departments. A hospitalist is NOT going to be able to get a stomach specialist in to see a hospitalized patient any faster than my doctor, and since discharges are mostly affected by these other departments, they WILL NOT GET PATIENTS OUT ANY FASTER EITHER!!! I would love to see the "specialized training" that DMH's hospitalists are said to have had that makes them so much better than my family doctor. If this is the claim made by DMH "hospitalists" that they are smarter and can get patients out of the hospital faster, then I would beg the H&R to
PROVE this claim. For now, it's all a line of bull...
ERROR #3Dr. Yu said family docs weren't forced. That is total B.S. The "letter" sent out by Dr. Cavanagh WAS THE EXACT SAME LETTER sent out by Dr. Wall and Dr. Tim Miller. Why? Because THEY DIDN'T WRITE IT!!!!!! DMH wrote the letter for them! Because these doctors were all TOLD to do this!! Why? Well, as many have said, FOLLOW THE MONEY!!! DMH THINKS they're going to cash in on the internists turned hospitalists, but in reality they're paying double the doc salary for each patient their family docs turned over to the hospitalists. How, in the name of logic could you conclude this would be GOOD for DMH financially?
ERROR #4Dr. Patrick Cavanagh DID WITHDRAW PRIVILEGES from St. Mary's Hospital JUST LIKE ALL THE OTHER DMH-EMPLOYED FAMILY DOCTORS HAVE. These patients DO NOT HAVE A CHOICE as to which hospital they can go to see their own doctor. NEITHER HOSPITAL HAS DMH-EMPLOYED FAMILY DOCTORS SEEING THEIR OWN PATIENTS; ALL HAVE TURNED THESE PATIENTS OVER TO STRANGERS. In fact, Dr. Cavanagh hasn't had admitting privileges to St. Mary's for SEVERAL MONTHS!! Did you even call St. Mary's to verify your story before you put this in the paper?!?!? Obviously NOT.
ERROR #5
You again compare Decatur with Bloomington and Springfield. THESE ARE TWO CITIES WHICH ARE TERTIARY REFERRAL CENTERS!!! Decatur IS NOT!!! You also forgot to mention that St. John's Hospital had MANY MORE hospitalists than now, but let most of them go, BECAUSE THERE WEREN'T ENOUGH PATIENTS FOR THIS LARGE CITY AND TERTIARY REFERRAL CENTER TO MAINTAIN MORE THAN TWO OR THREE HOSPITALISTS!!!
Actually, your gross errors in comparing Decatur/DMH to Champaign-Urbana/Carle, Springfield/St. John's AND Bloomington/OSF illustrate completely what the root problem in this situation is: Mr. Ken Smithmier still thinks he's in St. Louis. He thinks that Decatur is like a bigger/more professionally equipped city like Springfield or Bloomington or even Champaign-Urbana. The trouble is, DECATUR IS NOT LIKE ANY OF THESE CITIES!!! We DO NOT have Prairie Cardiovascular running our interventional cardiology service, we DO NOT have the cardiovascular and thoracic surgery capabilities that Memorial Medical Center/St. John's Hospital have, we DO NOT have SIU School of Medicine providing dozens of specialties available to our patients, we DO NOT have Carle Clinic and it's dozens of specialties available to patients, and we DO NOT have the population density/large corporate donors/specialties that a community like Bloomington-Normal has to offer.
We are in Decatur, Illinois. We're too small and too limited in our scope to have enough patients to keep a REAL hospitalist program (run by residency-trained hospitalists) running. If ROCKFORD can't keep them going, then Decatur sure as hell can't. The trouble is, Smithmier knows this deep down, and the only way he thinks he can get it to work even marginally is TO FORCE THE ISSUE. MAKE his doctors give up St. Mary's privileges; MAKE his family doctors give up their hospital patients to hospitalists, and then USE the H&R to sell the issue to the public. There's even talk that he's trying to marginilize some of the non-employed family docs to get their patients, too.
This guy is going to jail in a few months; think about it. This is the epitome of denial by a reckless leader who thinks he is still in control while his empire crumbles.
Looking at all this, it is now fairly clear why so many people at the "SHOWDOWN AT ST. MARY'S" were reported to be angry and bitter at the H&R! The bias is becoming more and more easy to see.
