In the story about the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center nurses, Kowalczyk interviewed seven of the nine trauma nurses who cared for Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the ICU, as bombing victims recuperated in rooms nearby. The nurses were deeply ambivalent and some feared for their lives because of public anger at him, but no one refused. They felt healing his wounds was their duty, and told themselves they were preparing him to face justice. But when one nurse called him “hon,” she could not live with herself and vowed not to refer to him by a term of endearment again.
The story about the response of Boston hospitals to the Marathon bombing dug beneath the widespread praise they received for saving victims. The day’s utter chaos male, and there were communications breakdowns and moments of confusion in those unfamiliar first hours, Kowalczyk found. In particular, some of the centers struggled with an unprecedented tide of unidentified patients who inundated their emergency rooms. An ambulance brought one woman to Massachusetts General Hospital with a handbag, but it wasn’t hers. It belonged to her best friend, who was killed on Boylston Street. Before the mixup was noticed, the family of the dead woman was told she was in a hospital bed.
The Lahey Clinic story documented Robert Reed’s visit to a suburban dermatologist’s office, which seemed ordinary at first. He was led into a small exam room with a scratchy paper-covered table, where the doctor inspected his skin and squirted liquid nitrogen onto three precancerous spots. The statement he received a month later appeared anything but ordinary: It included $1,525 in “operating room’’ and hospital “facility’’ charges. To many people this may be the equivalent of billing for oral surgery after a teeth cleaning. But Lahey, which owns the dermatology practice, said Reed’s insurer allows it to charge patients an overhead fee when they are treated by doctors it employs — even when their offices are not located in the hospital but in a medical building 10 miles away.The practice has become widespread as hospitals buy physician practices, Kowalczyk found.
The fourth story in the package described the plight of Harold Engler, who spent 10 days in a Boston teaching hospital, trying to snap back from complications after urgent hernia surgery. Nurses provided around-the-clock treatment, changing the 91-year-old’s catheter and pumping him with intravenous drugs for suspected pneumonia. So he and his wife were shocked to learn that Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center had never “admitted” him.Thousands of Medicare enrollees in Massachusetts and across the country are finding themselves caught in this same perplexing bind, Kowalczyk found. Despite long hospital stays, they have been deemed observation patients or outpatients instead of “admitted” patients. The difference in terminology is not a mere technicality: It leaves patients responsible for paying the full cost of follow-up rehabilitation care in a nursing home.