« It may just take a mixed race, former community organizer, who speaks in full paragraphs to present an America to the rest of the world that is mostly united.... | Main | Right-Wing "24" Harming the Military »

February 10, 2007

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Health Care

How many times have you heard a conservative say we don't need national health care because anyone off the street can just go to the emergency room and get treatment and the rest of us have to pay for it? Well, guess what. It isn't true. This week another story has surfaced of yet another homeless hospital patient, unable to pay for his care and with nowhere to go, being dumped on skid row in his hospital gown by hospital staff.

A paraplegic man wearing a soiled hospital gown and a broken colostomy bag was found crawling in a gutter in skid row in Los Angeles on Thursday after allegedly being dumped in the street by a Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center van, police said.

More than two dozen people saw a woman pull up in the hospital van, force the man to throw himself from the car and crawl to the sidewalk holding his belongings in a bag clenched in his teeth, then pause to touch up her makeup and spray on perfume before driving off. This behavior is, apparently, becoming more common – it is certainly not the first such incident for this hospital, and other hospitals have also been suspected in prior incidents of dumping homeless patients on skid row.

The case comes three months after the L.A. city attorney's office filed the first indictment for homeless dumping against Kaiser Permanente. The charges stem from an incident earlier last year when a 63-year-old patient from Kaiser Permanente's Bellflower medical center was videotaped as she stepped from a taxi in gown and socks and then wandered the streets of skid row.

Los Angeles officials have accused more than a dozen hospitals, as well as some outside law enforcement agencies, of dumping patients and criminals on downtown's troubled skid row. The city attorney's office said it was considering filing charges against several other medical facilities.

This sort of thing should never happen, particularly in the United States.

Posted by Becky at February 10, 2007 12:52 PM