Can socialized medicine be any worse?
________________

Suit settled over towel found in patient 1 hour, 27 minutes ago

CANTON, Ohio - The Cleveland Clinic settled a lawsuit filed by the
family of a woman who died seven years after a surgeon left a
rolled-up towel inside her chest.

The confidential agreement with Bonnie Valle's family came Thursday,
almost two weeks into a jury trial in Cleveland.

Also Thursday, Judge Nancy Margaret Russo dismissed claims against
Valle's Canton-based doctor, Jeffrey Miller.

Valle had surgery for emphysema at the Cleveland Clinic in 1995 and
died at age 60 in 2002. She donated her body to the Northeastern Ohio
Universities College of Medicine in Rootstown, where a dissection
revealed a green surgical cloth the size of a large hand towel in her
left lung.

Her family sued in 2004, claiming that because Valle's doctors never
found the towel, she suffered serious complications, incurred medical
expenses and died.

"She always said, `On the left side it feels like there's something
there. It felt like something moved,'" Valle's daughter, Jeanne Clark,
said in 2004.

Clinic attorneys disagreed that the towel affected Valle's health.

In a letter to the medical school, Miller wrote that he did not think
the towel affected the length or quality of Valle's life.

"She lived seven years ... which is certainly as well as one would
have expected her to survive given her severe emphysema and poor
pulmonary function and overall condition," Miller wrote

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070126/ap_on_re_us/towel_in_body