The AP article states that "Witnesses told police a van from Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center pulled up to a tiny park in the grimy area near downtown at 10:45am Thursday, a side door opened and a man, dressed in a green hospital gown and pants, began struggling to get out. The driver looked on."
I don't care who you are, but there is no human being that deserves to be 'dumped' along a road. Obviously, he was at the hospital for a reason, and whether or not his time was up at the hospital, he did not deserve to be dumped along a road, with no services around.
The price of doing this? The Los Angeles City Attorney's office filed an indictment for homeless dumping against Kaiser Permanente for a similar incident earlier last year.
Posts
The last time I was unfortunate enough to require hospital care, I stayed for a few hours and the hospital ran some routine tests. The bill ran into the thousands although the tests conducted were simple $75 clinical sample tests.
ReplyDeletePrivate hospitals thrive on massive revenue, city subsidies and tax advantages. How often after all do you see a hospital having a "going out of business" sale? What would a used bed pad be worth anyway?
Hospitals who thrive on it's monopoly of the sick while receiving perks and incentives from public sources should be banned from releasing a patient into a potentially harmful environment that's incompatible with his/her ailments.
The fact that the hospital should be sued in order to compel the hospital into civilized health practices is an outrage. Our government has seen fit to regulate everything else in hospital operations, yet the user of those operations is beholden to the hospitals option of securing their welfare?
Perhaps a private hospital can't be forced to provide treatment, but it should certainly be required to insure that it doesn't release patients into an environment that is likely to make the condition(s) worse.
If it's true that the hospital made a commitment to change their practice and still has not, then I would expect (and hope) that the hospital will be sued senseless to established a precedent in this case that equals the apathy it has shown towards it's customers (patients). We'll be watching this case to see what the legal outcome is.
Danny Vice
The Weekly Vice
http://weeklyviceblogspot.com