By Pamela K. Browne –
The legacy of the late comedienne Joan Rivers may be so much more than amusing memories and auctioned personal items if her daughter, Melissa, can help push through new laws governing oversight of outpatient surgical clinics.
Joan Rivers died Sept. 4, 2014, seven days after slipping into a coma after multiple doctors committed an apparent series of egregious errors during a medical procedure that went terribly wrong at Yorkville Endoscopy, an outpatient surgical clinic in Manhattan.
Melissa sued the doctors and the clinic for medical malpractice and in May, the suit was settled out of court for an award estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars.
Currently, some 5,400 outpatient surgical clinics compete with hospitals nationwide for patients undergoing procedures that can include colonoscopies, oral surgery and some plastic surgeries. These types of clinics are popular with patients and doctors alike but oversight is murky at best.
In an interview with Fox News, Melissa said reform is long overdue.
“I am not saying we shouldn’t have these ‘surgical centers,’” she said. “I do think these serve a really important purpose in dealing with medical costs and outpatient surgeries, and there are things that you do not need to be in a hospital for. But you need to know that you are going to get, that you are going to be safe.”
