ABLEnews Extra

                    Picking Up the TAB

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"There's Justin," 2-year-old Alyssa Mendat shouted when she saw her
brother on a TV news report this week.
   
Justin Bates' face has been on television plenty in his young life.
The local news. The national news. Talk shows. His picture has been in
newspapers everywhere.
   
But Justin doesn't know it. He doesn't watch. He can't talk.

[CURE Comment: We find such pronouncements arrogantly presumptuous.
Morevover, they contradict the experiences of many--within and without
our CURE family, including persons who have come out coma.]

He has spent nine of his 11 years in a Fort Lauderdale hospital bed
while his mother, the hospital and the legislature fight over his
future and who will pay for it.
   
Broward General Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale, by its own
admission, made a series of mistakes a decade ago while treating
Justin.
   
When Justin, then 16 months old, went into an asthma attack on Jan.
14, 1985, his mother took him to the emergency room at Broward
General. He has never left.
   
Doctors inserted a respirator down the wrong bronchial tube. Justin's
lung collapsed. His heart stopped. Doctors got him breathing again,
but not before he had suffered irreversible brain damage.
   
A jury awarded Justin and his mother $8.6 million. But the hospital
has yet to pay the family anything because of a state law limiting
judgments against government-supported facilities to $200,000.
   
The Legislature is now considering bills that would force the hospital
to pay more than the state cap. A final vote is expected within the
month.
   
Meanwhile, Justin breathes on his own as a machine keeps his lungs
moist. He is fed through a tube.
   
    Round-the-clock care
   
His spine is curving, bending him into a fetal position. Soon the
pressure on his lungs may leave him unable to breathe, and steel rods
will be placed along his spine to compensate. His bones are brittle. A
tube drains excess fluid from his head.
   
No one can say the extent to which he can feel or experience any
sensations, although he does respond to music and his mother's voice.

[CURE Comment: This response common among persons living in coma who
are encouraged and not abandoned indicates Justin "knows" more than
TAB bias propagandizes.]

"It's not a smile like you or I make," his mother, Cynthia Mendat,
said. "But it's happiness. You can see it on his face. There's
somebody in there. How much of somebody's left in there, I don't know.
None of us will ever be a part of Justin's life."

[CURE Comment: But, dear soul, you ARE...and such a vital part.]

The North Broward Hospital District, which runs Broward General, says
it would have to cut back services for poor patients if forced to pay
the entire award.
   
The hospital says the cost of Justin's $1,000-a-day care is now up to
about $3.6 million. The hospital has put a lien on a $2.4 million
settlement Mendat received from other medical professionals involved
in the case. The hospital wants $1.8 million from that settlement to
pay for five years of care before the suit.
   
Until everything is resolved, Mendat doesn't have the money to take
Justin home and care for him.
   
The hospital had offered to keep Justin for the rest of his life at no
cost, including any future surgery.
   
Mendat says no. She wants Justin to live out his remaining days at her
Coral Springs home, where she lives with her husband, two stepchildren
and Justin's 2-year-old half sister.
   
"You think I fought this battle for 10 years for them to permanently
keep my son?" Mendat asks. "My battle now is to get my son from them."
   
The hospital says it has offered to set up an annuity to care for
Justin at the hospital or at home, including building Mendat a new
home. Mendat said the offer wasn't made until December and wasn't
enough to support Justin.
   
The hospital says it favors a compromise worked out this week in a
House committee, in which the Mendats would get about $3.8 million
from the hospital but the hospital would get $1.8 million from its
lien. The Senate has not yet discussed its version.
   
"There's nothing we want more than to pass this bill," said Tom Panza,
attorney for the hospital district. "We want this child to go home to
his mother."
   
Justin will need around-the-clock care for the rest of his life: 30
years at most, perhaps only five.

[CURE Comment: The prognosis of those who disvalue life with
disability must be treated with a healthy degree of skepticism.]
   
    'Totally double dipping'
   
In 1990, when the lawsuit finally went to trial, the hospital admitted
fault in opening statements.
   
A jury awarded Justin $2.86 million and his mother $5.78 million with
about 96 percent covering past and future medical costs.
   
The district vehemently challenges its portrayal as an agency with
minimal tax support and fat reserves that is abusing the sovereign
immunity concept, designed to protect government agencies from being
ruined by big lawsuits.
   
The district runs four hospitals and several other medical facilities
and gets $110 million, about 11 percent of its $1-billion-a-year
budget, from taxes.
   
And though it has an $11 million insurance reserve, much of that money
is tied to other cases and can't be depleted to pay for Justin.
   
The hospital also says it has never billed Cynthia Mendat, despite a
claim by Mendat's lawyer that it had billed her for past medical
expenses.
   
"He put the bill into evidence to pump up the verdict," Panza said.
"It's totally double dipping."
   
Mendat's attorney, Sheldon Schlesinger, says the hospital didn't have
to pay the entire $8.6 million judgment because it was credited for
the $2.4 million the other doctors owed.
   
    Hostage to hospital
   
Mendat, meanwhile, looked to the state to override the sovereign
immunity restriction. Attempts in 1993 and 1994 both stalled.
   
On Tuesday, a House committee approved and sent to the House floor a
bill under which:
   
   * The hospital would pay $2.7 million for a $20,000 a month
     annuity, with an annual 7 percent increase for inflation, to
     support Justin at home.
   
   * It would pay $90,000 to convert his home, $30,000 for a special
     van, $150,000 for medical equipment, and $157,000 for general
     care expenses.
   
   * It would also pay about $750,000 for damages and suffering.
   
   * And the hospital would get that $1.8 million from its lien.
   
The Senate committee is looking at a bill that calls for $1.82 million
for Mendat and Justin but doesn't pay the hospital for its lien.
   
Rep. Ben Graber (D-Coral Springs), who is pushing Justin's bill
through the House and is himself a doctor, is blunt in his opinion of
the North Broward Hospital District.
   
"You can not calculate what they've done here," he said. "They've
destroyed the child. They've destroyed the mother. Then, to add insult
to injury, they hold the child hostage for 10 years. And when you try
to get them to free the child they hire high-paid lobbyists and pay
well over $1 million to fight it."
   
"That's so preposterous it's ridiculous. I can't even describe how
stupid it is," Panza responded.
   
"It's not that it hasn't tormented the hell out of me," Mendat said.
"But if I break down and lose control of the strength I have, there's
nobody to fight for Justin."
   
[Florida Lawmakers Consider Bill to Make Hospital Pay Boy's Tab, Eliot
Kleinberg, Cox News Service, April 15, 1995]

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