New Orleans Hospitals in Serious Condition, 11 Months Post-Katrina

You go to the drugstore to refill a prescription and learn the doctor's left town. You spend an extra week in pain because disk surgery isn't an emergency. You're admitted to a hospital, but the rooms are full, so you spend days in ER.

That's what it's like in New Orleans today if you need health care. The system is in serious condition, 11 months after Hurricane Katrina.

And it could get worse.

Within the next two to three months, "all the hospitals" will be considering cutting services, said Dr. Mark Peters, board chairman of the Metropolitan Hospital Council of New Orleans.

The medical community also suffered a blow last week when a doctor and two nurses were arrested on suspicion of murder, accused of giving four patients - stranded in the hideous conditions at flooded Memorial Medical Center - lethal doses of morphine and a sedative.

Since the chaotic days after the storm and the subsequent flooding, hundreds of doctors have fled the city, says Gery Barry, chief executive for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana, one of the state's largest insurers.

"About three-quarters of the physicians who'd been practicing in the New Orleans area are no longer submitting claims to us," he said.

Some doctors returned, but like the neurologist treating Janette Trembus for Parkinson's disease, chose not to stay. Trembus's daughter, Marci Kraus, learned the doctor had left when she tried to refill a prescription in March. In the end, her mother's primary care doctor provided a temporary refill and helped find a new neurologist.

Two months later, a letter arrived saying the neurologist had moved to Florida.

Susan Dantoni, president of the Orleans Parish Medical Society, thinks the Blue Cross estimate overstates the situation. It may omit doctors who take Medicaid patients, not to mention those working at free clinics, she said. Dantoni believes at least half the area's 2,300 doctors are back.

That might seem enough because New Orleans has fewer than half the residents it had before the storm. The current estimate is roughly 220,000.

"The problem is, it's not a good mix. You may be back in Orleans Parish, but your doctor may not be," said Jack Finn, president of the hospital council.

In the four worst-hit parishes, 2 out of 5 hospital beds are out of circulation; in New Orleans itself, it's 2 out of 3.

Susan Seip's eye surgeon was back, but the laser needed to clear the milky haze from her vision was destroyed in the floods at Memorial Medical Center, which is still closed. Her doctor referred her to another ophthalmologist, whose laser was safe but in storage. She finally found another doctor with an accessible laser.

"I waited probably three months to have my procedure done," she said. "When I did get it done, it was 30 seconds an eye."

Any doctor who's back may be much farther away.

John Burr, who had a bone marrow transplant a few days before Katrina, now drives about 40 miles across Lake Pontchartrain instead of a few miles across town to see his doctor at Tulane Cancer Center. Not that he's complaining - he's delighted the office is that close, organized. "Seeing what we had been through, I was extremely impressed," he said.

Another problem: For whatever reason, more people are waiting to see a doctor until they can't wait any longer. Then they hit the emergency room. Like ERs everywhere, those in and around New Orleans were overloaded even before the storm. Now it's worse.

"The patients we're seeing are very sick," said Becky Gab, operations director for the emergency department at Tulane University Hospital and Clinic. About half the people who come to the hospital's ER end up admitted, up from 15 to 30 percent before the storm, she said.

"Before the storm, diabetics would come in with high blood sugars," said Brent Becnel, at the Touro ER. They were easily and quickly treatable. Now, when they come in, they're in much worse shape, needing ICU treatment to prevent a diabetic coma.