Why is Justina's family panhandling for cash to pay her hospital bill when they won't owe anything for her medical care since the State of MA took custody of her 4 days into her hospital stay? Because the state has custody of Justina, she is assigned MassHealth as her primary insurance. If her parents have a private health insurance policy for her, MassHealth will become her secondary insurance (pay deductables).
http://www.mass.gov/eohhs/docs/dcf/health-med-services/faq-masshealth.pdf
Justina can be seen on the link below with a feeding tube. It would be very interesting to know when and why she had a feeding tube. Because there is a gag order on this case and HIPAA, we will only hear the parents' side to this story.
http://www.westhartfordnews.com/art...oc51a7cd6ac43e1332842736.txt?viewmode=default
a. Definition of Panhandling: To approach strangers and beg for money or food
To beg in the streets
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/panhandling
b. Other Words for Panhandler: beggar
c. Connotations of panhandling: unlawful forms of public solicitation: asking for money (requesting, coercing, threatening)
Aggressive panhandling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"It is the habitual manipulative, coercive, or intimidatory use of another individual's sympathy, fear, guilt, or insecurity for monetary gain. It is a form of emotional and financial abuse."
Solicitation of funds in an inappropriate or intimidating manner.
It is the habitual manipulative, coercive, or intimidatory use of another individual's sympathy, fear, guilt, or insecurity for monetary gain. It is a form of emotional and financial abuse.
d. Synonyms for panhandling: begging, sponging, hustling, mooching, scrounging, cadging, freeloading
e. Definitely a negatively charged word being used to describe benefits from a dance recital, or three hours of sales, or other efforts by family and friends to help Justina's family deal with the costs of her illness.
It doesn't look like the father was out on the streets with a three week beard, stinking of alcohol, pushing his kid in a wheel chair, and swearing at everyone who doesn't hand over their cash. (I see these panhandlers every day, as does everyone who lives in a city these days.) But, I could be wrong. It could be that opening a PayPal account to accept donations and having them designated for Justina's care could be seen as the act of a cheap street hustler. Perhaps it's similar to the double dipping engaged in by people who earn a salary from an organization while collecting a pension from a previous position in the same organization. After all, most people can afford that $2,000 a day bill, right? Oh wait. That's the bill for private insurance. Public insurance is "only" $1,000 per day at most. So that's only, say, $30,000 for each month of Justina's incarceration that the hospital's psychiatric benefits from. So, after nine months, they've only taken a little over a quarter of a million dollars from the tax payers to lock up this young woman, impair her education, ruin her family ties, add to her depression and have no visible results to show for it. Surely the hospital would never go after the family for any of this since the hospital's staff insisted on keeping this young woman within their complete control.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/20...l-uncertain/Y7qvYTGsq8QklkxUZvuUgP/story.html
Perhaps the people donating to help her, assumed that Justina would not be forever imprisoned in a mental health facility because a bureaucrat who had a theory to prove decided Justine's disease didn't actually exist. It was all in her mind, right? After all, they'd just had a long battle with Elizabeth Wray, even going against court orders that she not be locked up, to prove she didn't have a disease either. And going after her parents with false charges of child abuse just as they are doing in this case. Maybe Justina's supporters believed that when she was released into the care of her family, the costs of her care would be even higher.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/daily_videos/massachusetts-works-to-curb-rising-healthcare-costs/ Especially since they will have to make up for the months that BCH has denied Justina the medication that had previously allowed her to figure skate, attend school, have an almost "normal" life despite her condition.
Incarceration is a loaded word, just like panhandling, and I'm choosing to use it. Being given no choice in anything you do, being locked in 24/7, being told when you have to get up, when you have to have lights out, when you have to study, that you can't see your family for more than an hour a week and then only if a security guard sits between you and your mother, that you can't see your friends, that your phone calls will be monitored, being denied medication that helps you and being forced to take other drugs--that doesn't sound like a nurturing or healthy environment for a sixteen year old girl who has medical problems. It sounds like the routine for juvenile delinquents serving a sentence in a reformatory. The hospital bureaucrats don't care that she asked not to be there, don't care that she asked for a lawyer. They've told her she has no choice. They don't care if she's unhappy because they will just blame her unhappiness on her mother, not on their own actions. As well as her health issues, which are still unsolved, Justina must also worry about being locked up with people who are a danger to themselves and others. If she didn't have emotional problems when she was admitted, I will bet anything that she has them now.
Maybe those people who are organizing fundraisers just want to help someone they care about, with whom they are allowed little contact. Maybe they don't trust that BCH won't turn around and charge the family with the bill for Justina's treatment should the family win their court case.
f, If you go up-thread you'll find an explanation of the feeding tube in the article mentioned in post 5. It had been used for Justina's treatment before the family ever took her to BCH.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/20...l-uncertain/Y7qvYTGsq8QklkxUZvuUgP/story.html
"…early on the staff had been suspicious of Linda's demand that her daughter get a temporary feeding tube in order to increase her nourishment. But immediately after the parents lost custody, the report noted, Children's had determined that the feeding tube was indeed medically necessary and Justina was given one." In other words, the hospital, the bureaucrats, the doctors who accused the mother of child abuse were WRONG. The mother was right. Sadly, the mother's demand for a feeding tube was included in the list of the reasons given as evidence of medical child abuse by the psychiatric unit of BCH to DCF in order to strip the parents of any voice in Justina's care. The mother was so right in her outcry to the judge that she hadn't done anything wrong!
g. The gag order was put in place by the judge so that nothing said by witnesses on the stand during his hearing could be made public by any of the parties involved. This means that the parents cannot repeat what was said during the trial. Neither can hospital staff. Neither can the lawyers. Neither can the press. The hospital has had no problem putting its case forward in interviews unless it comes directly under patient confidentiality policies of the hospital. The BCH side is that everything physically wrong with Justina is because of a mental disorder. They haven't been able to prove it because their imprisonment has resulted in very little, if any, improvement. Interestingly, the patient that was the hospital's previous example of somatoform disorder was released, IIRC by court order, the same morning as Justina was admitted. Equally interesting was the comment by Dr. David DeMaso (Children's psychiatrist-in-chief) that the mental health field has moved away from using somatoform disorder as a diagnostic tool. The only party interested in demanding Justina be treated for this disorder has no medical qualifications--DCF. This may have come up in court, but we don't know for sure because none of the press, the parents, BCH or the lawyers have broken the gag order.
Also, please don't tell me that BCH doesn't have a professional spin doctor handling press duties for the hospital. BCH has been hiding behind patient confidentiality so that they will seem to be an innocent victim of vindictive parents and nasty media. BCH has some wonderful units, according to the many reports I've been reading. However, BCH is a gigantic corporation interested in defending its brand. It has been accused many times in the last 18 months of routinely kidnapping children for profit. You'd think that if BCH hasn't responded with a cogent explanation in all that time, it's because where there's smoke, there's fire. A unit whose chief psychiatrist has, in just nine months since BCH used the disorder to prove child abuse in Justina's case, says it is of little use as a diagnostic tool, has a lot of explaining and apologizing to do.
h. I'm not sure if these references will do much more than give a general impression of the lengths to which other parents and patients have had difficulties in dealing with the autocracy of BCH. They certainly point out the friction between mainstream and cutting edge medical practitioners, and the term quackery is used a fair amount on both sides. This is a highly emotional case, and it will be an expensive case not just in financial terms but in the way that parents will now have to be very, very careful of which hospital they take their children to. And, if BCH is not alone in this practice, I think it should colour the way in which we view the very intrusive big business of medicine.
http://www.naturalnews.com/043298_boston_childrens_hospital_kidnapping_medical_profiteering.html
http://www.change.org/petitions/bos...-release-elizabeth-wray-to-her-to-her-parents
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/a-pandas-story/
http://bostinno.streetwise.co/2012/...s-hopsital-custody-battle-pandas-pans-disease
I'm sure that the many medical members of websleuths will be able to give a balance to the issues raised by this case, and will be able to give solid answers about any questions concerning the methods the psychiatric units of BCH use to conduct themselves. I hope they will put to rest the fears that reading more about this case and previous cases at BCH have raised in my mind. My experience with specialists and general practitioners, and with RNs and practical nurses, and EMTs, is that these wonderful men and women have a great drive to help others. However, my experience with hospitals has been neutral to negative. I've had to advocate for my parents, for my children and for myself when it became clear that big business and bureaucratic needs were the driving forces in the decisions being made and that the needs of people were being ignored. For many years now, a patient's advocate has become part of the staff of larger hospitals because lay people, like me, need that kind of back up. I'd love to hear how a patient's advocate could have mediated in the dispute between this BCH unit and Justina's family.
