Institutional Immorality

What do you do to an institution that appears to take the immoral road at every decision point, yet is trusted with human lives? That is what the UC Regents should be asking themselves about UCI Medical Center in Orange.

I reported last month about how UCI let 32 patients die, rather than tell them the hospital's highly self-touted liver transplant program was a sham. The UCI center that helped low-fertility and infertile couples conceive children was busted and closed when it was found the center was selling fertilized eggs to other couples.

And today, news that the final lawsuit has been settled in UCI's unauthorized sale and gross mismanagement of cadavers and body parts -- that's right, they sold off Aunt Tilly without telling Uncle Ernie. The final lawsuit, settled for $500,000 from UCI and $200,000 from a UCI's willed body parts program director, involved the body of Anneliese Yuenger, which simply disappeared. Says her daughter,

"We still don't know what happened to her. I can understand why, for legal reasons, they wouldn't want to apologize and set a bad precedent, but it's hard to believe that after all this time they still can't say where her body ended up."

Yuenger's body was donated for medical research; then, according to the OCRegister, it gets murky and creepy:

The family donated her body to UCI's medical school, and a month later her ashes were ready to be returned to the family, despite the fact that most donated bodies are used by medical school students over the course of a year. Stranger still, Diane Yuenger was told by someone in the program to meet a man in an In-N-Out Burger parking lot. She did, paying $600 for a plastic bag full of what she was told were her mother's remains.

They weren't.

In October 1999, The Orange County Register matched the cremation tag the family found in the ashes to the records of the Gardena mortuary that the school used to cremate the donated bodies.

The newspaper found that the ashes given to the Yuengers were those of a box of miscellaneous body parts burned in February, before Anneliese Yuenger had died.

I've always been told that if you're badly injured in OC, you want to make sure you go to UCI because it has the best emergency room care. Then you want to transfer out as soon as you can.

I'm beginning to understand why. All eyes should be on the UC Regents. They're either going to address UCI's immorality straight-up, or prove themselves as immoral.