BAD MEDICINE

First, the wrong leg was cut off a diabetic man suffering from gangrene in February at the University Community Hospital in Tampa, Fla. Then a hospital worker killed a man on March 3 by mistakenly shutting off his ventilator. Now the same hospital has admitted that a woman was nearly sterilized without her consent on March 16, when a doctor tied one of her two fallopian tubes during a Cesarean delivery. The physician stopped the procedure after being told the patient had not authorized it. "We stand ready to correct the procedure if that's what she desires," said a hospital spokeswoman. The woman still can give birth with one tube tied. The federal government has threatened to cut off $50 million in Medicare payments to the 424-bed hospital and is giving administrators until April 20 to start fixing its problems. "It's just utterly outrageous," says TIME health care writerJanice Castro. "Normalquality controlsshould have prevented any of these things from happening."