NO DOCTOR COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE THAN THIS GUY -- BUT THE "REGULATORS" STILL LET HIM LOOSE

That the guy is black had nothing to do with it, of course. Just a small excerpt of the full story below:

"State Department of Health regulators expressed increasing alarm in recent years about a South King County physician who was charged this week with rape - calling him a "bad doctor" as early as 1999 - but allowed him to keep working. The state suspended Dr. Charles Momah's license a year ago, after a rape accusation, but had already logged several unrelated complaints about the obstetrician-gynecologist.

Doctors, nurses, hospital administrators and state investigators questioned Momah's medical skills and practices. Investigators generated dozens of reports detailing Momah's behavior: yelling at patients and nurses, ignoring pages and making suspect medical decisions. Complaints began in 1998. Since then, 50 patients have reported Momah to the state and 47 women have sued - most since the first rape allegation. The Department of Health is pursuing 18 separate disciplinary charges against Momah and investigating 29 more complaints, said Donn Moyer, department spokesman....

Prosecutors say other sex-related charges weren't filed because a three-year statute of limitations had passed.

Moyer acknowledged that the state could have acted more quickly against Momah for questionable professional and medical conduct. It is unlikely that any disciplinary action by the state before the rape allegation would have resulted in Momah immediately losing his license, Moyer said. "I'm not going to candy-coat it," he said. "I'm not going to hide this from you - there is culpability on our part."

... the first complaint against Momah - alleging a variety of unprofessional acts - wasn't filed by the state's Medical Quality Assurance Commission until June 2003, two months before the rape allegation surfaced and nearly three years after the commission had opened its investigation. The commission licenses doctors and investigates complaints against them.

During the spring and summer of 2001, state investigators generated more than 30 Momah-related memos. Several dealt with complaints that he was frequently unavailable when emergencies arose at the hospitals where he practiced - Auburn Regional Medical Center and Highline Community Hospital in Burien. Both eventually revoked his privileges.

In one instance, in May 2001, nurses repeatedly and desperately paged Momah while one of his surgical patients bled uncontrollably, reports say. A passing orthopedic surgeon and an emergency-room physician stepped in to treat the woman as her blood pressure dropped and doctors pumped six units of blood into her, according to reports of the incident. When Momah finally called in, he told a nurse to call him back "in an hour if there was a change."

Nurses on duty at the time, and later the patient herself, alleged Momah destroyed and altered records about the incident.

State investigators also were concerned that Momah appeared to be performing major abdominal surgeries in his small suite of offices in Federal Way without certification as an outpatient surgical center. They learned about it after Momah brought tubs of "heavy duty" surgical instruments to Highline hospital for sterilization, reports show.

Washington's investigation is not the first Momah has faced. While a doctor in New York, where he began a practice in 1987, he was reprimanded and censured for negligent care. He also was indicted in 1997 on 23 counts of billing fraud, by the New York Attorney General's Medicaid Fraud Control Unit. He was acquitted of the criminal charges, but ordered to pay $500,000 in overbillings in a civil case. He paid $350,000 cash and promised the remainder within a year.....

Washington officials knew about the New York reprimand and fraud cases, state records show. But because New York did not restrict his license, Momah was able to practice medicine in Washington when he moved here in 1993......"

More here

"Regulators" create a sense of security -- but they are chronically negligent so the sense of security is a con. As this story shows, in practice there is no regulation. And how do the regulators get so negligent? Because they never suffer any penalty for it. So only the patients suffer. Without regulators, people would be warier and safer