Four months after Joan Rivers died after going into cardiac arrest during what should have been a simple endoscopic procedure, we are slowly but surely learning bits and pieces about the people who were in that procedure room with her. Dr. Lawrence Cohen was the surgeon on duty and also the medical director at the Yorkville Endoscopy Clinic where Rivers was a patient. In 2012, Cohen wrote an article bemoaning the cost of having an anesthesiologist on duty for simply endoscopic procedures.
According to TMZ, which dug up the piece written by Cohen, the good doctor was seemingly more worried about cost-effectiveness than anything else.
Cohen writes, "Although we can all agree that [monitored anesthesia care] is a highly effective and safe method of sedation, the question is whether it is worth the extra cost to our health care system."
Cohen then answers his question: "The answer is clearly no."
Cohen crunches the number in his article, saying the average cost for an anesthesiologist is $400 per procedure, but the risk of death is 1 out of 100,000. Cohen therefore concludes that it costs $40 million to save one life, adding that cost "far exceeds ... an acceptable level of cost-effectiveness."
It is obviously worth noting that there was an anesthesiologist on duty during Rivers's procedure, one who allegedly gave the comedienne too much Propofol and then ignored her crashing vitals for minutes, but she was there. In Rivers's, case she might have been better off without the extra set of hands and eyes to keep her stable, and it would have saved Cohen money and his job, too!
In the months that have followed, Cohen has been fired and Melissa Rivers is gearing up to sue everyone who can be linked in any way to her mother's death.
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