Posted on 04/21/2009 10:30:12 AM PDT by Responsibility2nd
A woman who was paralyzed after disobeying warnings to remain in her seat during a turbulent flight over Texas has suffered the same type of catastrophic injuries as the late Christopher Reeve, according to a nurse who first treated her.
"She is paralyzed from the shoulder area down to her toes," said Kathy Fulp, a nurse at the McAllen Medical Center, where two passengers and one crew member from Continental flight 511 from Houston to McAllen were taken early Saturday morning after being injured mid-flight.
Fulp told ABCNews.com that the 47-year-old, whom she declined to identify by name, suffered a broken back at the thoracic level and a fracture between the C1 and C2 vertebrae in her neck, the same injury that left Reeve paralyzed after falling off his horse in 1995.
She had gotten up and gone to the bathroom," said Fulp. Her husband, Trey Fulp, a spinal surgeon, was as of mid-day today operating on the injured passenger at the McAllen Medical Center. It was not immediately known if she will be able to walk again.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
It is sad, but there is a reason you are supposed to be in your seat and buckled during turbulence.
poorly written. The surgeon is the husband of the nurse. The injured person has not been identified.
Wow.
Not a real positive review, huh?
But check out this doctor:
http://www.ratemds.com/doctor-ratings/99449/NJ/Plainsboro/House
People like him. They hate him.....
I wonder if the turbulence hit when she was in the bathroom before the signs were turned on.
Has Mrs Fulp ever heard of HIPAA? I hope she has a good lawyer...
“Has Mrs Fulp ever heard of HIPAA? I hope she has a good lawyer”
If there ever was a piece of caca legislation written to put money in the pockets of lawyers, HIPAA is it.
Ok, these morons elected the Ozero,...she should NOW be cured with embryonic stem cells!
I definitely agree. However, it is the law of the land, and the lawyers are luvin’ it.
Article said she got up while the seatbelt light was illuminated.
Damn. How did she get the horse in the airplane toilet?
Husband = spinal surgeon ???
Something wrong with this picture.
Medical professionals, please advise: can this be accurate? Patients with the type of injury Christopher Reeve had cannot breathe on their own. It seems impossible that someone with that injury could have survived the remainder of the flight.
HIPAA does not contain a private cause of action. None. Not a single one. You can bring a complaint with the Department of Justice, but unless it’s a cause of intentionally disclosing multiple instances of protected health information for monetary gain, the person who leaked the information is not going to be hit with any significant monetary penalty.
And if he or she is, the money doesn’t go to the patient.
If you want money, then you need to sue under some state law invasion of privacy law. A HIPAA violation isn’t going to earn you a dime.
We now think of HIPAA as medical privacy legislation. It didn’t start that way. HIPAA is the acronym for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 — basically, to advance an individual’s right to portability of his or her health insurance coverage from job to job (pre-existing conditions and the like).
To make the cost of HIPAA palatable to the parties involved, Congress said “I know it’s a pain that different people who are accepting or submitting electronic claims are requiring different information or formats. How about if we say that anyone who deals electronically has to adhere to specific code sets and information, so that you don’t have to deal differently with different payers/providers?”
That was a good idea, but privacy activists took note: “Electronic? How are we going to protect our privacy?”
HIPAA then ended up with electronic and physical standards for privacy, as well as the standards for privacy that people consider “HIPAA” when they talk about HIPAA today.
HIPAA is often less protective than the state laws that were already in effect. That’s why HIPAA has a weird preemption clause. It says that it preempts state law unless the state law is more strict, in which case it doesn’t preempt state law.
Except for having privacy officers and worrying about HIPAA, the effective date of HIPAA was a lot like the Y2K bug. A lot of buzz about nothing.
There was a lot of money spent on consultants, yes. But HIPAA does not create any individual cause of action — no way for a person to sue and make money directly as the result of a HIPAA violation.
You need some state law violation of a right to privacy for that purpose.
One more and I’ll stop — unless the nurse also gave out some individually identifiable information, such as the patient’s name, or a photograph, or address, there may not have been a HIPAA violation anyway. Speaking about an injury to an unidentified patient is not a violation of HIPAA.
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