A Bad Place to be Broken-Hearted

Kerry Howley | February 14, 2005

Small hospitals in Massachusetts and elsewhere are battling for the right to remove blockages from their patients' arteries. Non-emergency angioplasties, which are becoming a vastly more common way to deal with blocked arteries, are currently only legal in Massachusetts hospitals with open-heart surgery programs. The risk of complications has fallen to less than one percent thanks to improved technology, but the restrictions remain. The Boston Globe reports on a doctor who found a blockage but was forbidden to touch it:

Marks had more bad news for his patient: Massachusetts regulations forbid him to perform the procedure at the suburban hospital in Weymouth. So he left the 4-inch tube holding open an entryway to the artery in her thigh, told her not to move, summoned an ambulance, and transferred her to Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston, where later that day he did her angioplasty.

Whole thing here.