Hospital Faces Skid Row Dumping Charges

[NVMojo]

LOS ANGELES (AP) - A Los Angeles hospital accused of dumping homeless patients on downtown's Skid Row is facing the first criminal charges in the city's campaign to crack down on the practice and clean up the area.

Kaiser Permanente is among 10 hospitals under investigation by city prosecutors for allegedly discharging homeless patients to the streets of Skid Row rather than to a relative or shelter.

The case against it stems from a March surveillance video showing a 63-year-old patient from Kaiser Permanente's Bellflower hospital wandering Skid Row in a hospital gown and slippers. Prosecutors describe what happened to Carol Ann Reyes in a 20-page document supporting the false imprisonment and dependent-care abuse charges.

"We seek to end the inhumane and illegal practice," City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo said in Thursday's Los Angeles Times.

snip...

Skid Row has one of the nation's largest concentrations of homeless people, in part because it has a cluster of shelters and services to help them. Police have long suspected that medical centers and law enforcement agencies from elsewhere used it as a dumping ground for homeless people.

more...

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/nat-gen/2006/nov/16/111602580.html

[acmejack]

1. They have been dragging their feet on this investigation!

This hit the wires months ago. Of course it involves the homeless, so who cares? A month here a month there, WTF?

[whistle]

2. This is a practice by hospitals all over the United States, that is

...the bigger story and also the story of how the U.S. health care system is broken.

[AnneD]

3. I see this all the time....

the not so secret practice that hospital have to get more bed space and purge those that can't pay. This summer I had an experience with a poor confused woman that was dumped. She came through my door (when the repairmen were in). Poor thing accused me of taking her house over. Thank goodness for those Nursing skill because they came in handy. I was able to redirect her feed her and give her water (we're talking a July afternoon in Houston, she was dehydrated). She trusted me enough to let me read her hospital paperwork and give it to the very kind policeman that answered the call. We were able to get her to her family-but she could have been another stat. Welcome to Bush's Amerika.

[acmavm]

4. Yeah, it's bush**s America but it was created by Ronald Reagan

[AnneD]

6. True...it has it's beginnings there....

but the Bush's and jr. in particular, have gutted the system. There are but a embers left. If we don't start working to improve it soon-we will be really hurting as the boomers age and require more medical care.

[goclark]

8. So true, when RR was President

he let many of the mentally challenged patients out of the hospitals and onto the streets to live.

I will always remember a photo in the LA Times at that time that had a mentally ill man howling on the top of a wire fence in someones neighborhood.

I was in college and I cried that day.

It was tragic and has gone downhill since RR implemented that policy.


And to think that he was a victim of the same problem except that he had "superior" treatment.

[saigon68]

9. Yes Ronnie RayGun first enabler of the NEOCONs

[irislake]

5. I hope Michael Moore

was aware of this practice when he did his expose of the American for profit health care system.

[Freddie Stubbs]

7. I'll bet that Sebastian Bach is pi**ed

;)

[enlightenment]

10. Gads, how I hate that hospital.

Close to 30 years ago, when I was living in LA, there was a report about an Hispanic couple who drove up to Kaiser's emergency room late in the night. The wife was 7 or 8 months pregnant and suffering extreme distress; not labor pains. The husband carries his wife into the ER. The admissions staff asks for his Kaiser card. He doesn't carry Kaiser insurance - this was just the closest hospital ER.

Nope, says the ER, we don't take non-emergency patients (this without examining the woman at all) who don't have our insurance; you'll have to go elsewhere - nope, we won't transport, take her in your car.

He tried. By the time he got her to the next hospital ER she was dying. Placenta abruptio (probably complicated by other factors). I always believed Kaiser should have been shut down then and there, but they argued that because there were no obvious signs of distress (like blood), that they didn't believe it was serious.

The Mengele school of medicine, I guess.