It is the Washington Post which should apologize to Trina Bechtel's family. The writers of the WaPo, in their frenzy to create another story about Hillary, violated the families' privacy, which Senator Clinton left intact by declining to name the woman or the hospital or specific details in the case.
The only fact that Ann Kornblut knew was that the deputy sheriff really did tell Hillary the story she was telling. That was all that she should have printed. All the other details--names etc---she should have verified for herself before printing them. Hillary left them out for a reason. Kornblut was not as smart as Hillary, and she is the one who started the whole mess, libeling the woman's hospital and casting unwanted media attention on her family.
Here is the article called "In Speeches, Clinton Often Veers to the Dark Side."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/02/AR2008040203030_2.html?nav=hcmodule But it is the story of the pregnant pizza worker to which Clinton comes back repeatedly. At a Democratic dinner on March 2, she recounted it in full. She told it at a late-night rally in Cleveland just two days before the Ohio primary March 4, bringing the noisy audience to near-silence. She told it again in Charleston, W.Va, last month. Even her daughter, Chelsea, who was with her mother in Ohio when she heard the story, repeated it at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania last week. Clinton was told the story by Bryan Holman, the Meigs County deputy sheriff, who said the deceased woman was Trina Bachtel, whom campaign officials had been unable to identify.
Bachtel, Holman said, had been turned away from the hospital not only for lack of $100 but also because she had unpaid bills -- a detail that Clinton has not mentioned. Public records show that Bachtel of Pomeroy, Ohio, died on Aug. 15, 2007, at age 35. She previously had thousands of dollars in hospital debt, but it was paid off by 2005.
"It was a really terrible story," said Holman, who said he voted for Clinton in the Ohio primary. He said he is grateful that she has taken Bachtel's story to heart. "That is what we wanted."
The Washington Post used hearsay from a man who was not in possession of the deceased woman's medical records in order to write this story in which it painted Bachtel's hospital of guilty of the act of turning her away for lack of funds--- a violation of federal law which can get a hospital stripped of its Medicare eligibility, essentially closing it down.
There is a significant difference between making a general statement about an unnamed woman who could be anyone and printing a story in the paper about a named woman. The Washington Post knew this, yet they give no indication that they attempted to contact the woman's family or hospital before printing her name. They were in too much of a hurry to portray Hillary as someone who tells gruesome stories. Note the picture with its caption by Anne Kornblut (more about her later):
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who spoke at Kings College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., yesterday, often chooses to tell dark tales rather than use light phrases while campaigning. This was more RNC anti-Hillary oppo. The WaPo did not care who got hurt along the way.We all know that people die from lack of proper medical treatment at emergency rooms. Last year, Edith Elizabeth Rodriguez plead for help and even called 911 as she perforated a bowel and bled internally in a Los Angeles emergency room. Her pleas for help got her arrested. She died in handcuffs in the ER.
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977028731Although emergency rooms are required by law (the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act) to see and stabilize everyone who comes through their doors, they are not required to treat a condition they deem "non-emergent" which is how a patient can slip through the cracks. If the physicians at one ER say that a headache due to a bleeding aneurysm is a tension headache and send a patient home with tylenol and the patient dies, medical malpractice may have occurred. If the patient had no insurance or was on Medicaid or some sort of partial pay insurance, often the family may suspect that substandard care was given for reasons of low profitability. Having done my residency at a teaching hospital that treated both no pay and full pay patients, I can confirm the fact that the latter were much more likely to receive the attention of faculty physicians. And this was twenty years ago. Since then, there has been a decrease in funding for public and teaching hospitals and an increased push for "non-profits" to increase their revenues.
Given the public concern about so called "patient dumping", emergency rooms that fail to meet the requirements of EMTALA, I can understand why the hospital that delivered the deceased woman's stillborn baby felt called upon to issue a statement.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/05/us/politics/05woman.html?_r=1&ex=1365134400&en=7824b4f8ea3b363d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin The woman, Trina Bachtel, did die last August, two weeks after her baby boy was stillborn at O’Bleness Memorial Hospital in Athens, Ohio. But hospital administrators said Friday that Ms. Bachtel was under the care of an obstetrics practice affiliated with the hospital, that she was never refused treatment and that she was, in fact, insured.
“We implore the Clinton campaign to immediately desist from repeating this story,” said Rick Castrop, chief executive officer of the O’Bleness Health System.
Linda M. Weiss, a spokeswoman for the not-for-profit hospital, said the Clinton campaign had never contacted the hospital to check the accuracy of the story, which Mrs. Clinton had first heard from a Meigs County, Ohio, sheriff’s deputy in late February.
I hope that the CEO and spokeswoman did what the WaPo did not do---contact the family and get permission before speaking to the press. Because in Ohio, the deceased have the same rights to privacy under HIPAA that the living do.
http://hipaa.ohio.gov/privacyrule/sec3b.htm#3.8 3.8.PHI of Deceased Individuals: CE must comply with requirements of the privacy regulations with respect to PHI of deceased individuals.
Finally, today, the family is quoted in the New York Post as saying that Hillary lied about the deceased. However, Hillary did not name her and the family was unaware that the deputy sheriff was under the wrong impression about the story (which he says he was told by a family member of the woman) until the
Washington Post chose to run the unconfirmed story without checking it for accuracy.
Has the Wshington Post issued a retraction or apology for publishing untruths without bothering to fact check them? Hell no. They are trying to jump on the "Gore is a liar and Hillary is one too" bandwagon.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/04/05/a_tragic_tale_but_is_it_true.htmlby Anne Kornblut "A Tragic Tale but Is It True" (note the title, The WaPo can't just call Hillary a liar because they printed the same story
but with the significant addition of the name and that is what started this whole mess. So Kornblut tried some CYA by saying
Well, it might have been true about some other hospital. Must not let it look like I shirked my duties and libeled a major hospital chain in my zeal to portray Hillary as Elvira Queen of the Dead. (Here's crossing my fingers and hoping the RNC and all the Obama supporters are so happy with me for finding another Hillary "lie" that they cover for me. Maybe KO will have me on Countdown) If she is, it's because her campaign apparently did not adequately check the story Meigs County, Ohio, deputy sheriff Bryan Holman told Clinton and her daughter during a Feb. 28 campaign stop, about a young pregnant woman who died after being turned away from the hospital for lack of $100. Recently unearthed video from the campaign trail shows that Clinton heard the story of Trina Bechtel almost exactly as she has been repeating it for the better part of a month.
After The Washington Post drew attention to Clinton's oft-told story, officials from a local hospital where she was eventually treated demanded that Clinton stop telling the anecdote because it suggested the hospital had been at fault.
"We implore the Clinton campaign to immediately desist from repeating this story," Rick Castrop, chief executive officer of the O'Bleness Health System told the New York Times; his company runs the hospital where the woman's baby was stillborn.
The young woman later died in Columbus.
But it is unclear whether the hospital in question in Clinton's story is, in fact, O'Bleness.
According to deputy sheriff Holman, Bechtel sought treatment -- he did not know where -- from a hospital and was turned away because she could not make a $100 payment. Hospital officials said they demanded the Clinton campaign stop repeating the story because there are some people in their community who erroneously believed it referred to O'Bleness Health System.
"It's not for certain that it is us, but there are people in our community who believe that it is. We did have the patient, but we're not certain if she went somewhere else as well," explained Lynn Anastas, vice president of community relations for O'Bleness Memorial Hospital and the Health System. "There are a number of neighboring counties that have hospitals, she easily could have gone somewhere else." Bechtel did have health insurance, Anastas said, adding: "We did not turn her away."
A couple of points. Guess who else did not fact check. That is right. The newspaper which decided to investigate and publish the deceased woman's name. Now, why would any reputable newspaper do that? Are they itching for a libel lawsuit? Also, Kornblut says it was after the WaPo drew attention to
Hillary's story that the family became upset, but that isn't it. Everyone had heard Hillary's story and no one put 2 and 2 together--because it didn't add up to Ms. Bachtel. The deputy sheriff got it wrong. But when the Washington Post threw in
a name, that started all the trouble.
Clinton did the right thing. She gave voice to the concerns of a Democratic voter about a problem that really does happen while allowing a family to remain private.
The Washington Post did the wrong thing. It did a sloppy article for the sole reason of painting Hillary as some kind of macabre horror queen, and in the process it brought a grieving family into the limelight.
The right to privacy is one of the most important rights that patients have in America. The press apparently does not care. They will do anything to sell copy. There is no reason---not even a pressing need to portray Hillary as a liar---that should supersede people's right to be left the hell alone.
The press is also having a field day doing exactly what it did back in the early 1990s---portraying Hillary's push for universal health care as unnecessary.
Don't listen to her we are being told subliminally.
When she says that our health care system is broken she is nothing but a liar. She will take away our good insurance and kill us with bad care, just for spite, because she is a horror queen. .
Gore Vidal from
Point to Point Navigation about a lecture he gave Hillary at his first dinner at the White House in the early 1990s.
http://www.drb.ie/fa_thoughtsfrom.html talked about Washington in general. About Eleanor Roosevelt, whom I'd known and she was fascinated by. Then I began to probe, tactfully, I hope: How well did the Clintons understand just what they were up against? Did they know who actually owns and is rather idly running the United States - a very small class into which Bush had been born and trained and they had not. So, Who? What? How? I gave an example of poignant concern. In 1992 the country, by a clear majority, wanted a health service. But insurance companies, in tandem with the medical-pharmaceutical axis, have always denounced any such scheme as Communist, and so the media, reflecting as it must the will of the ownership, had decreed that such a system is not only unworkable but un-American . The ownership spent hundreds of millions of dollars on television advertisements 'proving' that under the Clinton plan each citizen would lose his own doctor and become a cipher in a computer (which he is pretty much anyway, thanks to the FBI, etc.), while its authors were guilty of everything from murder to ill-grooming.
As an old Washingtonian, I mentioned some of the ways in which the great corporate entities destroy politicians. 'It will never be on the issues. It will always be something unexpected. Something personal. Irrelevant. From long ago. Then they will worry it to death.'
'That's certainly true.' Mrs Clinton was grim. 'No story ever ends here. Even when it's over.'
'It will never be on the issues. It will always be something unexpected. Something personal. Irrelevant. From long ago. Then they will worry it to death.'I never imagined that Gore Vidal would be talking about the people at DailyKos and DemocraticUnderground.
Now, I promised a few words about Kornblut. I have written about her work before, in my "Press vs. Hillary" series. Here is the Anne Kornblut page of shame at Media Matters. Yes, you can plug in any media whore (not a gender specific term, Fineman at Newsweek is one of the worst) and find out just what they have been up to). Anne Kornblut kisses McCain's wrinkly parts and savages Clinton whenever possible.
http://mediamatters.org/issues_topics/tags/anne_kornblutHere is my letter to the Ombudsman at the WaPo:
ombudsman@washpost.com
To the Ombudsman of the Washington Post:
Dear Deborah Howell;
One of your writers, Ann Kornblut wrote an article for the Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/02/AR2008040203030.html?nav=hcmodulein which she inserted the name of a deceased woman into her column. As far as I can tell she made no attempt to contact the woman’s family to tell them that she was going to include this “heart-rending anecdote”, this “most shocking story” in a major national newspaper. Since she was able to determine the woman’s name, she should have been able to contact next of kin to obtain the verification of the story and their permission to use it. Sen. Clinton herself had not used the woman’s name or specifics. Kornblut even added details. “she had unpaid bills -- a detail that Clinton has not mentioned.”
When the woman’s hospital contacted the New York Times to say that they had been lied about, it was really your paper that committed the libel. Hillary used no names. Her story was generic as was appropriate with hearsay. She was giving expression to the concerns of Democrats without violating the privacy of the deceased woman and her family. In Ohio, the deceased have the same privacy rights as the living. These apply to health care providers but ethically, they should apply to everyone. The important point is that no one associated with the case knew that this story had anything to do with a specific woman, until Kornblut decided to publish this.
Now, she is trying to protect herself
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/04/05/a_tragic_tale_but_is_it_true.html"Is Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton repeating an anecdote on the campaign trail that turns out not to be true?
"If she is, it's because her campaign apparently did not adequately check the story."
That is not the reason that the woman's hospital contacted the NYT or her family spoke to the New York Post. They did that because your newspaper named the woman. Kornblut damaged her reputation in the community and Kornblut put her hospital's Medicare reimbursements in jeopardy.( Any emergency room that turns away a patient for lack of funds will be stripped of Medicare. That is the law.) Since Hillary's story was generic, it put no one in any risk. When Kornblut named names without verifying anything, she put the family in the media spotlight, she put a hospital system in the spotlight, she made the hospital and the family antagonists.
Just because the press can find a detail, that does not mean that the press should print the detail without first verifying it. The proper way to approach this story would have been to report that the sheriff’s deputy exists and that he told a story as Sen. Clinton told it. That was the only fact that Ms. Kornblut knew and that she could responsibly repeat.
I am waiting to see the Washington Post issue a retraction and an apology.
McCamy Taylor
Maybe in reporting, just like medicine, they need a motto, first do not harm. All of these "lies" that Gore then Kerry then Hillary have been accused of have done no harm until the press has stepped in to hijack to news and use them to obscure real stories and real issues--like the tanking economy that should be making it impossible for McCain to get elected and Bush's attempts to invade Iran and the ongoing efforts by the DOJ to stonewall investigations of the administration while Democrats are persecuted. Why wasn't Ms. Kornblut writing on one of those topics?
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