AMARILLO, Texas (KVII) \u2014 Potter County commissioners approved a contract with the Lubbock County Medical Examiner’s Office after the district attorney said he was having “sticker shock” with the cost of autopsies.<\/p>\n
During Monday’s meeting, 47th Judicial District Attorney Jason Herring said the county had a long time agreement with Dr. Thomas Richard Parsons at South Plains Forensic Pathology in Lubbock until Parsons retired last year. Dr. Luisa Florez at Texas Panhandle Forensics then started handing Potter County’s cases.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was always kind of a gentleman\u2019s agreement in place that when either Dr. Parsons or Dr. Flores brought in a new forensic pathologist, that before they touched our business or those cases that are going through the prosecutor\u2019s office, they would provide the CV and all the qualifications for that doc before those autopsies were performed,\u201d Herring said.<\/p>\n
But Herring said new doctors were being hired by Texas Panhandle Forensics, and the DA\u2019s office wouldn’t find out until it got the autopsy report. Some of those new doctors were also charging significantly more for the autopsy than expected.<\/p>\n
“I had some significant heartburn with sticker shock because I know what we usually pay,” said Herring.<\/p>\n
Herring said the new contract with Lubbock County will mean his office will always know who is doing the autopsy and what the cost will be.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat it costs them to do an autopsy, no matter what the decedent\u2019s status is, it\u2019s now a fixed price instead of an escalator,\u201d Herring said.<\/p>\n
Herring said earlier this year, Randall County approved a contracted with the Lubbock County Medical Examiner’s Office which opened a new facility on February.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AMARILLO, Texas (KVII) \u2014 Potter County commissioners approved a contract with the Lubbock County Medical Examiner’s Office after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":372670,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[168,170,169],"class_list":["post-372669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-lubbock","tag-lubbock","tag-lubbock-headlines","tag-lubbock-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372669\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/372670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}