Government Health Care

Government Health Care

Military Medical Mistake Disfigures Local Airman

Jessica Read is still stunned about what happened to her husband. "It's very hard for us to understand."

Last week, 20-year-old Colton Read, who grew up in Arlington and who's now in the U. S. Air Force, went to have laparoscopic surgery to remove his gall-bladder at David Grant Medical Center at Travis Air Force Base near Sacramento.

His mother, Shelly Read-Miller says he wasn't worried. "He said 'Mom, this is routine, it's no big deal.'"

But what happened during surgery turned out to be a very big deal.

Jessica Read says around 10 a.m., about an hour into the procedure, "A nurse runs out, 'We need blood now,' and she rounds the corner and my gut feelings is, 'Oh my God, is that my husband?'"

She says his Air Force general surgeon mistakenly cut her husband's aortic artery, but waited hours to transport him to a state hospital which has a vascular surgeon. "It took them until 5:30 to get him to UC Davis. I don't understand."

Because Read lost so much blood during that time, doctors had to amputate both legs. His mother sobbed, "I watched him take his first steps, and now his legs are gone."

"Disfigures"? Disfigures? If they'd left a scar on his face, that would be "disfiguring." THEY TOOK HIS LEGS.

But that's not the worst part:

Read's wife says the doctor admitted it was human error. "All my husband ever wanted to do was to deploy, all my husband ever wanted to do was serve his country. He used to tell me when we had flyovers and they played the national anthem, the chills he would get from the pride that he felt from being an American airman, and this is something an Air Force doctor has taken from him."

But because of an old federal law called the Feres Doctrine, Read, his wife, and his family members can't sue the military over what happened to him.

Now, when the .gov takes over the $2.3 trillion in annual health expenditures, what do you want to bet one way they'll eventually attempt to limit costs will be by limiting patient's right to sue for malpractice?

Now I'll state right up front that I sincerely believe that tort law needs to be reformed, and it's long overdue, but there are cases such as this one where the patient MUST be compensated. This young man went in for gall bladder surgery, and came out missing his legs. He now faces months of rehabilitation, prosthetics, and a lot of pain, plus he's out of his job, facing medical retirement on about half of his current $1,600 monthly income.

But the government cannot be held responsible.

And Obama and company want to foist upon us a system that will, sooner or later, be just like this.