Dr. Robert Midgley Willing to Use Punitive Measure Should Patient Ask Questions - Questions Considered Hostile Sacramento, California

Dr. Robert Midgley, who is serving in the Legal Department of Kaiser Permanente, South Sacramento is certainly not all bad.

His problem is consistency in terms of honoring the Hippocratic Oath.

Left to himself, he will try to do the principled, the ethical thing.  However, put the least little bit of organizational pressure on him, and he will crumble like a stale cookie.

When men and women get together in professional mobs as happens with the Permanente Medical Group, and silence and secrecy in collusion with attorneys becomes the way things are done, that is when serious problems arise.

I have no trouble understanding why, just three years ago, Dr. Midgley helped an elderly patient in pain, and this time abandoned him to his suffering.

In the first instance, Dr. Midgley was free to help. This time, the code of silence (known as lawyers) intervened, and Dr. Midgley simply caved. His medical knowledge should have prevailed, but it didn't, not in that environment.

From the advocate, we learn that Dr. Midgley was given full warning that Medical Board filings would be forthcoming, if he didn't prevent the elderly man from suffering. He was warned that the  Department of Managed Health Care would be contacted.  Dr. Midgley was told of the patient advocates who would be upset, if he didn't honor the Hippocratic Oath.

However, all of that was insufficient for Dr. Midgley to simply act properly to prevent the most potentially deadly kind of damage to an elderly patient.

When one is surrounded by a billion dollars worth of lawyers, buildings and physicians, it's quite easy to gather the impression that one is invulnerable. In that context, it is completely understandable why this elderly patient was made to suffer with Dr. Midgley's full permission.

But, this is a new age. Sins are shouted from the roof tops via computer. And, the little man now can be heard, thanks to services like the Ripoff Report. No longer can a billion dollars guarantee that the common man will have no voice.

I found the following material to be very insightful:

"Let me share with you a real experience I had with Kaiser Permanente that may shed some light on Dr. Midgley's behavior.

It is true that he could have been so much more proactive, as I understand was the case at another time.

However, in my case, when I had a problem, as soon as it was escalated any distance at all up the chain of command, I received a contact from an attorney ordering me not to contact anyone at Kaiser to solve my problem.

In other words, the attorney wanted me not to contact the very people who had the power to solve the problem.

Lucky for me, I ignored the attorney. He kept threatening me, if I didn't stop trying to solve the problem, and I kept ignoring him.

Finally, I found a fellow working in the chain of command with a heart, and the problem was solved.

My point here is that I think a lot of the problems created at Kaiser Permanente are due to bad advice from lawyers.

They really don't want to solve the problems, especially if they are paid on a billable hour basis as this attorney was above. I know that because he worked for a private firm under contract with Kaiser.

That is what is called a HUGE conflict of interest.

So, in this case, as soon as Midgley refused to take care of the problem at his level, and as soon as a contract attorney was consulted, this whole situation was lost, IF the chain of command wasn't strong enough to tell the lawyer to go to h**l, which evidently they weren't.

No longer was an amicable solution possible, since the attorney's advice would almost surely be to be silent and let the problem fester.

I can still remember this lawyer threatening me over and over again about not trying to solve the problem out of court. It was such an evil message, and I think we have lots of that in America.

I am a Japanese citizen, and have relatives in Japan. They were thinking about expanding their law schools a while back, and the reason that was defeated was that they didn't want to have lawyers ruining their culture as they do in the United States. How many speeches I heard in Japan saying things like, "Do you want to be like the United States with greedy lawyers by the millions trying to stir up trouble." Of course,  the people of Japan didn't want that. (By comparison, the US has one
lawyer for every 265 citizens. Japan has one lawyer for every 10, 000 citizens. And, every lawyer in American thinks he or she should be rich. What a mess!)

So what I am saying is that Dr. Midgley probably had a chance to solve the problem early on, but after a short while, Kaiser contract lawyers would have simply told everyone who had taken the Hippocratic Oath to shut off communication.

Of course, that's the worst possible advice. It just begs for more conflict when one side is being given terrible advice. But there it is.

You want to take a shot at real evil, I can give you the name and firm representing Kaiser that, had I listened to them, we would probably still be in court. As it was, the problem was solved at the physician level, where it should have been all along."