My Mother has told her doctors that she would rather die in her living room than be taken to the local HCA hospital.
The hospital has minimum staffing, 12-hour shifts, and a turn-over rate better than 50% [according to doctors on staff].
Mental patients ordered to psychiatric care by the court are allowed to just walk away. HCA won the bid for the contract to hold the patients, but has provided inadequate security to deal with them. One of those patients died in a shoot out with police after walking away from the hospital, the very situation that his family hoped to avoid by committing him. The patient killed a sheriff’s deputy, the first death of an on-duty officer in the County’s history, and the patient was the first suspect to die during an arrest in 12 years. [2008].
]]>Well, until one day she went in to talk to the ER head, and he wasn’t there… but a pile of papers was on his desk. She idly looked at them and realized she was looking at a smoking gun — a memo from HCA headquarters demanding that they transfer more uninsured ER patients to the public hospital, which noted that the lawsuit settlements for the percentage that died in transit were cheaper than admitting and treating the patients would have been. I.e., patient dumping wasn’t an accident. It was being actively demanded by corporate headquarters.
She took this to regulators, of course — nurses aren’t in the business of killing patients in order to increase profits, after all. She was illegally fired after regulators leaked her name to HCA, of course — the regulators went to the same schools as HCA administrators, of *course* they were more concerned about HCA’s profits than about, well, whether HCA complied with the law that outlaws patient dumping. The relative shrugged, and went to work for the public hospital where HCA was dumping their patients. At least there she wasn’t actively involved in killing patients.
HCA: Just say no to murderers.
– Badtux the Healthcare Penguin
]]>They understand about privilege, but not about the accompanying obligation.
]]>I’ll agree with you on the nouveau riche. TACKY and I’ll throw in “classless”, too.
]]>Mike Bloomberg really started the latest cycle, but the Rockefellers did it for years.
I have to say that the Rockefellers did it from a sense of noblesse oblige, like the Roosevelts , while the modern group thinks that they deserve power.
It occurs to me that the modern group also tends to be the nouveau riche who are almost always tacky people. 😉
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