LOCAL COLUMN
OPINION: Beyond Erasmus: The systemic rot of NM health care
How cruel is the corporation that would use the children of a disgraced doctor to try and rehab its reckless behavior of letting that doctor loose on patients in New Mexico. In addition to the sad Ardent/New Mexico Hospital Association/New Mexico Medical Society misinformation the children are spouting is the reality that it is painful to see any parent disgraced in the media.
Frankly, the Journal shares in the cruelty by choosing to print the children’s op-ed. We cannot call Mark Erasmus doctor anymore after all the patients he has maimed, paralyzed and who have wrongfully died at his hands. Erasmus fought the New Mexico Medical Board’s finding when board members found he was unfit to practice medicine and took his license away. Erasmus appealed the Medical Board’s removal of his license to a district court, to the Court of Appeals and to the New Mexico Supreme Court. At every step of Erasmus using the legal system, the decision to remove his license to practice medicine was upheld. Erasmus testified he believes he should still be allowed to do neurosurgery today.
He couldn’t care less about his patients. The real issue here is about so much more than Erasmus. The issue for New Mexico is the total failure of the corporations that continued to hire Erasmus and handed their patients to him, as dangerous as he was, for the sole purpose of making money. The CEO of Lovelace Medical Group (owned and operated by out-of-state corporation Ardent) testified that Mark Erasmus being fired had nothing to do with all the patients he hurt. He was fired because he failed to meet his financial targets.
There are good people trying to make health care safe for our patients and they are being stopped by the reality that billion-dollar corporations in this state are running the practice of medicine. Should it have taken 26 lawsuits and $19 million being paid (under a $600,000 malpractice cap even for wrongful death) for the Medical Board to finally take Erasmus’ license?
There are doctors the Medical Board is well-aware of today whose negligence has caused millions of dollars in damages paid to many of their patients as compensation for harm that the board members just ignore. We know they ignore the doctors because we make sure they know about them. A complaint is filed and the testimony of the expert physician who lays out exactly what the doctor did wrong to every one of those patients — under oath and enduring severe cross-examination by the doctor’s lawyer — is sent to the board.
So, the question is: Who handed our state’s medical system over to the billion-dollar corporations? Who is standing in the way of regulating the corporations so that medical care is accessible and safe? Who is stopping the Medical Board from doing its job? Who benefits from the system the way it is? Well, it is certainly not the patients who are being harmed. Answer the questions and we can fix the problem.
Lisa Curtis is the founding partner of Curtis & Co. Law Firm. She was the 2024 Best Lawyer for Plaintiff’s Medical Malpractice in New Mexico.