Quadriplegic gets bedsores from hospital stay

This is the latest horror story about the state of American health care.

Just outside New York City, a traffic crash victim was taken to the hospital with a spinal cord injury. The accident left him a quadriplegic.

While he was hospitalized, the hospital's failure to perform simple procedures led him to develop severe bedsores. His lawyer said the bedsores were so bad that they went "all the way down to the bone."

The bedsores had to be surgically closed. The sores also delayed his physical rehabilitation for so long that he is forever unable to rebuild his upper body strength.

Now the man has won a lawsuit against the hospital. And he deserves every penny.

Before the corporatists start babbling again about how we need tort "reform" before reforming anything else, this entry should put that notion to rest. If we had the rightists' vision of tort "reform", the patient in this story would have been out of luck. He would never have been able to win a significant award for the poor care he received.

Meanwhile, suits by money-grubbing health care companies against patients go uncontrolled. Just look at the court dockets for the counties in your area.

(Source: http://www.lohud.com/article/20091005/NEWS01/910050325/Crash-victim-awarded--2.2M-for-bedsores-from-hospital-stay)