HB1094 Hearing
The hearing for HB1094 was markedly one-sided. The hearing went on till almost 5 in the morning. I myself didn't get to testify till 4:30 a.m. Many of our witnesses, including many disabled citizens, working people who had to report to jobs the next day, or parents with children had to leave before they were allowed to testify, The medical community had no shortage of witnesses (most doctors don't work on Thursday, have you noticed?) who supplied all manner of anecdotal testimony about how painful medical procedures could be--like that was news to anyone.
As you view the video, (click here to view video, advance the video to 00:13:25 to see the beginning of HB1094 hearing) of notice how several representatives (Coleman, Delisi, Truitt, Jackson) badger the witnesses who support HB1094. Notice how often those witnesses' testimony is labeled "anecdotal" while testimony (advance the video to 5:32:46) of the same nature given in support of HB3474 is accepted with no reservations.
Witness Dennis Borrel cited three cases of "dead men talking" (advance the video to 4:05:52) in which the patients had suffered severe injuries and whose families were advised by hospital officials to remove the patients from life support. Yet despite these patients' slim chances of survival and their long periods of unconsciousness and recovery, all three indeed recovered to live active, productive lives. This remarkable and inspiring testimony was discounted as irrelevant by Representative Jackson because the cases occurred before the futile care law went into effect, as though such cases could not occur today.
Advance the video (4:26:01) to see where Represenative Delisi disallows testimony from two witness who couldn't reveal the name of the hospital in their testimony due to pending litigation. Many other witnesses testified about hospitals and in no other cases were witnesses required to identify the hospital in question, but the voicemail recording, which was hard, physical evidence was disallowed. Then when the witness decided to give verbal testimony about the incident, the testimony was still disallowed because the witness was not allowed to disclose the name of the hospital due to pending litigation.
Representative Delisi's blatantly biased decision to disallow that testimony was a blow to patient rights advocates, But we've made the the voice mail message available to visitors at our website. We ask that you download the voicemail and distribute it widely because people need to know what hospitals are capable of and how their actions can be a dark contrast to the perceptions they've sold the public and members of the legislature.
Click here to witness the voice mail. To download it to your harddrive, right click here and select "save as" to download the file onto your harddrive. Please feel free to distribute this or to link directly to the file on this website. Names of individuals and the hospital have been bleeped out due to pending litigation.