It Makes Perfect Sense That U.S. Hospitals Would Practice “Homeless Dumping”…

Given my own recent experiences with U.S. healthcare, I have no problem whatsoever understanding how hospitals in this country could practice ”homeless dumping.”  I guess everyone knows by now about “homeless dumping,” the tendency of some hospitals to take a sick patient who can’t pay bills and doesn’t have health coverage and dump him/her out in the street.  There was a particularly horrendous – but in my mind not so surprising - incident of “dumping” that made the news circuit last month.  From the L.A. times:

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.  The incident, witnessed by more than two dozen people, was described by police as a particularly outrageous case of “homeless dumping” that has plagued the downtown area.

“I can’t think of anything colder than that,” said LAPD Det. Russ Long, who called the case the most egregious of its kind that he has seen in his career.  ”There was no mission around, no services.  It’s the worst area of skid row.”

I say I have no problem understanding this, because it seems like just a logical extension of the way most of us are treated by the U.S. healthcare system if we don’t have insurance and don’t have a lot of money (whether or not we have homes).   Personally, I feel as though I’ve been treated like a piece of garbage because I have no health coverage or money to get decent treatment for my teeth.  So, I’ve been trying to get treatment in a sliding-scale-based clinic at Metropolitan Hospital (everyone take note!), because that place was recommended to me a long time ago, by an ex girlfriend who only went for some minor fillings or whatever and didn’t know any better.  I went there in serious need of heavy fillings and root canals, and suffering from a very bad dental infection (which has come back several times).

It took this place about nine months even to get to the first stages of a root canal that I knew I needed the first time that I went there in serious pain.  They did tell me that I could get treatment on an “emergency” basis - provided I wait for many hours - if I was willing to get the tooth pulled instead.  Maybe I was asking for too much when I expressed a desire to save my teeth…

Over the course of this time, I’ve had appointments canceled on me two out of three times, and each time I’ve had to go through major ordeals just to get appointments even one or two months down the road.  And when I’ve finally gotten there, the people treating me either forgot, or had no knowledge of, the problems that had already been discussed in prior appointments.  Plus, I had to wait for hours in the waiting room, with an appointment (made months in advance) just to get this wonderful kind of “treatment.”

Another lovely feature of this experience is that the uninformed student dentists(?) treating me refused to give me antibiotics and pain relievers when I requested them. Because of this, I went home after stage two of the root canal without any prescriptions. The dentist there said she wasn’t giving me anything because I wouldn’t need any medicine for infection or pain.  But, I ended up with a horrible infection and horrible pain, which was no surprise to me, given my history (which the dentists obviously knew nothing about).  And I somehow think if the dentist(s) knew anything about my history of infection or had any time to think about it, she/they would not have left me without medication.

I went today to try to get some medicine, during a time when I should definitely have been sleeping, and was told that I would have to sit for a “very long wait” before even being given the medicine that I should have been given before.  So, in my desperation to get some sleep, I said the hell with it and went back home.

At home, I discovered that I had some old antibiotics left over:  Three tablets of amoxicillin (from the times when this place actually did give me some medicine – months ago, before the root canal was started) and an older, fuller bottle of penicillin, from June of 2005, which I was given by Staten Island University Hospital (another sliding scale clinic, which is actually much better, though it also costs a little more – and when I think about how I complained about this place once too, I think now about how ridiculous it was for me to complain).

I also did some research on the Internet, where I learned that penicillin actually can often last a few years without expiring.  So, I think I’ll just medicate myself with these drugs for a while (plus maybe a handful of Advil now and then) and hope that they are as effective now as I remember them being sometime ago.

I don’t think that most of the people at this clinic are deliberately careless or negligent (except for maybe the woman at the reception desk – who probably loathes her job and is taking her anger about it out on patients, whom she causes to wait and suffer more than they might have to).  However, because of this barbaric non-system of healthcare that we must live with, a clinic like this obviously does not have the personnel or facilities that it needs to treat all the patients that it gets; conversely,  there obviously are many other patients with no other choice but to get “treatment” at a dump like this.  (Remember, everyone, it’s called Metropolitan Hospital, and it’s on 97th Street and First Avenue in New York.)

If Metropolitan Hospital – or any number of other hospitals in New York City – practiced “homeless dumping,” I wouldn’t be surprised.  And New York City is actually known to have a relatively good poor people’s hospital system – but relatively good obviously still means horrendously bad.

Here in the great United States of America, if you do not have health insurance and don’t have enough money and haven’t found a way to get into the sorry remnants of a Welfare system (which is much harder to get into than people might think), you might as well be a piece of garbage that the hospitals will gladly dump.  The U.S.A. does not care about your health or your suffering or that of 47 million other Americans.  Welcome to the richest and “greatest” country on Earth.

And, as I’ve always said, I have to wonder, where is the public outrage about this barbaric situation?  As a few people have pointed out, the “radical” Left is completely obsessed with Iraq and the Middle East to the point where it does absolutely nothing about this healthcare crisis or many other very bad things that are happening to poor and working people here at home.  Somehow, I can’t help thinking that this is exactly what the ruling class wanted; this was part of the plan all along.

There are more and more actions now to occupy recruiting stations and block sidewalks (at least) in protest against the war on Iraq.  And I say, all the power to them, because the old cattle stroll peace marches are worthless and ineffective.  But you won’t even find a cattle stroll to protest the healthcare crisis.  And this is an area that should be acted upon, with major civil disobedience and disruption.  Maybe some day (hey, I can always dream)…