the procedures would pose a threat to
patients.
And yet in 2014, Paulina Tam had
died after a spinal procedure at Fre-
mont Surgery Center. Tam had fin-
ished careers as a nurse and as an
educator and planned to travel the
world with her husband of 32 years.
“She was the driving force of the fam-
ily, the spirit,” said her son, Eric Tam,
MD, of New York City. “We didn’t ex-
pect the worst to happen.”
Pain from a car crash had bothered
Tam for years. Her doctor scheduled
her for a procedure to replace two
disks in her upper spine on April 7,- Any such surgery—entering
the front of the neck to address pain
in the spine—comes with a risk of
surgery and on input from stakeholders.
But Robert Beatty-Walters, an attor-
ney based in Portland, Oregon, who
has represented the families of three
people who died after spine proce-
dures at surgery centers, said Medi-
care’s decision-making process is not
evenhanded.
“The stakeholders—they call
them—during these regulatory pro-
ceedings are the profit makers, not
the people who are being provided
the service,” he said.
Medicare approved ten spine-
surgery procedures to be billed at
surgery centers starting in 2015 and
added more in 2017. In an e-mail, a
spokesperson for Medicare said that it
had received no comments suggestingThe parents of Reuben Van Veldhuizen, 12, who died after a tonsillectomyrd.com 113michael zamora/the register/usa today network
National Interest