State Medical Boards: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

As a physician I'm glad this is getting some attention. I just wish something would be done about insurance companies refusing to cover chronic medications, resulting in harm to the patients we prescribe them to.

we spent a long time telling people, "Hey! do you want to earn a lot of money? become a doctor!" and now we have a ton of doctors that don't give a shit about anything other than their bank accounts.

Thank you for covering this. I had a simple surgery in 2008 for a torn ligament in my wrist. My surgeon botched it. In trying to take him to court, I learned that he’d injured dozens of patients permanently including paralyzing one from the neck down. I wasn’t able to sue him because Oklahoma capped tort suit judgments at $150k (it’s now much lower), and cost to take it to trial was much more than that. I’ve had 6 more surgeries on the wrist. I’m in constant chronic pain and have only 30% use of my right hand due to it. I’ve been stuck in pain management since (opioids). I was a musician when it happened. It ended my career. I’m also autistic, and had difficulty with jobs in general. Now no one will hire me with a physical disability as well. My original doctor got no punishment from the medical board or any of the hospitals he practiced at. This shit needs to end.

Another doctor here, thanking you for this report. We ask the public to trust us and to listen to our expert opinions, but that should go hand in hand with transparency and policing ourselves and our own. We probably need federal legislation that opens the database to the public, but also requires hospitals to report every single discipline incident.

This makes House MD very realistic, how he got away with everything he did

As an individual with a physician spouse and a pharmacist myself, this issue should be taken 100% seriously. Not just for physicians but for other healthcare professionals as well (pharmacists, nurses, etc.). We need more patient advocates at the table, more reporting, and boards that review cases and take immediate action. We should go one step further and move towards a national licensing system with unified standards.

I'm a retired RN and graduated in 1978. I've seen many bad doctors and RN's during my career. I also saw when insurance companies started dictating patient care. It was horrific then and worse now!

I’ve worked in sex abuse for 15 years. So many clients have been assaulted by physicians, yet when we’ve made reports to the medical board, not one has ever been investigated. I don’t understand the point of even reporting it. The clients do report to the police, but very few ever get picked up by prosecution, another chronic problem.

As a doctor, I would WANT the NPDB to be robust and accessible. We already have a huge lack of doctors, and the bad doctors will make things worse. MAKE NPDB accessible to ALL

I work in a hospital; there is one thing that I have yet to hear John speak on. Medical boards are full of executives. While the COVID pandemic was raging on, one of our executives had the balls to tell is about getting away from the Bay Area and taking a month off at his vacation home. So when you say the boards are underfunded, no. The funds are just going to the top earners, just like the rest of the economy. These executives never had to take care of patients at all, but made MILLIONS before, during, and to this day.

"The white coat code of silence." That reminds me of something, cough law enforcement cough.

Between the dog eating the donated heart, the iced man CPR and the wig scene, I'm convinced someone at the writing team spends all day watching medical dramas under the excuse of "doing research"

They took away the working hour maximum for residents at one point because it wasn’t statistically decreasing errors but two things about that: I know residents who were forced to fudge their timesheets to make it look like they were under 80 hours a week when the limits were in place and regardless of the validity of the statistics I don’t want a doctor working on me in their 80th hour working that week. That’s insane.

I had a lithotripsy(waves to break up kidney stones) and should be in and out, same day. No issue... They told my girlfriend and mother that I would complain about the pain but I didn't need to return to the hospital. I knew immediately when walking out of the hospital that was something wrong but was repeatedly told I was fine. Long story short 6 hours later I returned to the hospital and apparently they "aimed wrong" i was bleeding internally. I was hospitalized 11 days, was very close to needing a blood transfusion and the lower 2/3 of my body turned people for weeks. I was told it's a routine type mistake they happen. Of course, i have no recourse..

As a child with severe asthma, I was once brought into the ER for breathing difficulties. The pediatre looked at me for maybe 10 seconds, than told my mom I was having a very slight cold and was making it up to miss school, and he discharged us that moment. 5 hours later, I was back in the ER. Long story short, I almost died of pneumonia at 10, was hospitalized for a week and had to quarantine at home for 2 months with our family doctor as only visitor as I was too week and the infection nearly vanquished all my immune system. I think about that pediatric ER doctor from time to time. I wonder how many kids he discharged to their death. Not the only story I have, but the most serious one that happened to me. A funny one is the pharmacist who rolled their eyes and told me "got it, we'll call someone else" upon seeing my prescription for the wrong medicine." He then explained that that doctor was known by all professionals in the neighborhood to be an old fart who should've retired years before. Medicine is wild sometimes.

As a physician, I can say I am disgusted by physicians who skirt the laws. A national system needs to standardize reporting so that bad nurses and doctors cannot hop from job to job.

Great story! I wish you had covered the Arkansas medical board. The now former director of the state medical board is being accused of holding patients against their will in a psychiatric facility in order to bill their insurance more. His name is Brian Hyatt.

We discovered during a mal practice case that reporting to the board is self reporting. The doctor in our case had killed people in 4 other states, lost his license in 2 states, and was still operating in the state we were in where he had multiple reports of misconduct. At the end of our trial he was not going to lose his license despite my sister dying due to his negligence. As part of the settlement my parents fought for him to surrender his license which he did, but that doesn’t stop him from getting his license back or going to another state and getting a license there. There needs to be massive change in boards including your entire medical record following you state to state and having offenses in other states play into new state licensure.

TYVM John Oliver for once again reporting the NEWS better than TV News stations in USA. It's so sad when a comedian does better research than TV News......GREAT JOB.

A member of my family was molested by a doctor and when she tried to do something about it she was told that she could EITHER report it to the police OR the medical board. She was told that they could not overlap and if she tried, then they would both drop the case/complaint. So, she had to choose if it was more important to her to try to get him jail time (which was unlikely) or if she should try to get his license taken (which was borderline impossible). She chose the medical board in hopes that it would protect other women. They forced her to testify in front of him while he laughed at her to her face, then they said, "we'll note your complaint" and proceeded to do nothing. Years later a detective came to the door and said he'd been looking for witnesses against the doctor for over year and had only finally gotten her name in a very round-about way. He had apparently abused dozens of women, if not more. I am disabled and after years of being treated like crap I had already lost faith that most doctors actually knowing what they're doing, but her experience made me scared of the whole system. We need NPDB to be accessible, we need systems that don't punish you for reporting other doctors or nurses, we need to be safe to get health care!