Commentary

Use of contract ER doctors prompts questions

By David Baker
Posted July 4, 2023

      The existence of multiple legal entities employing physicians in Samaritan Hospital’s emergency room that is revealed in the William Kramek lawsuit (See story "ER staff sued" below) prompts several questions:

    * Why are there so many legal entities involved in one emergency room?

   * Do any of  the entities named in the Kramek lawsuit employ more than one physician?

   * Who controls the four entities named in the Kramek lawsuit that list a St. Peters’s Health Partners facilities as its address?

   * It been reported that so called traveling nurses employed by an agency earn four times the pay of a staff nurse.  What is the cost of an ER physician working under contract for one of the legal entries named in the Kramek complaint compared to one who is a direct employee of the hospital or its owner?

   * Usually, if a lawsuit names, say, a hospital and two physicians, each will be represented by a different law firm.  But in the Kramek lawsuit, it appears that all the outside entities are represented by one law firm.  Why would this not create a conflict if there was a question of which of two physicians employer by different legal entities was alleged to be responsible for harm? 

  * What about Medicaid?  As a non-profit organization, the hospital is required to accept Medicaid rates for patients covered by the federal program for the poor.  But are the physicians who are employed by a separate legal entity also required to accept Medicaid rates in full?

   * Then there’s malpractice insurance.  Are the physicians covered by the hospital’s policy, or does each one have his or her separate coverage?

   These are some of the questions raised by the Kramer complaint.   Answers to them will likely prompt further inquiries on the staffing of St. Peters’s Health Partners’ facilities.

   Not a surprise is that the local media has been silent on this  story. A check of the Albany Times Union archives produced no story about the Kramer lawsuit or the $7.7 billion bankruptcy filing in May by Envision Healthcare Corp. the company that  provides ER doctors to emergency rooms around the country 

   As has been reported on this page, TU publisher George Randolph Hearst III has a seat on the St. Peter’s Health Partners’s board and has raised millions of dollars for the company. 

   Over the past 26 years the paper has ignored dozens of lawsuits alleging wrongful death and serious injury filed against hospitals and other facilities now operated by St. Peters Health Partners.

    What is clear is that the St. Peters management knowingly allowed an outside for-profit company to benefit from deliberately misleading people at what would often be a time of great stress and discomfort, right in its own emergency rooms.

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