Most Americans don’t fully realize how bad the corporate model world medical system is actually doing. Here is Democracy Now in reportage about a man held in Arizona in solitary confinement within a hospital for almost a year, appropriately titled ‘Is Sickness a Crime?‘
The victim of a new strain of TB resistant to treatment is being held without any rights in a jail inside a hospital in Phoenix. As these new antibiotic resistant infectious diseases begin to spread, we can expect to see the public panic to spread like wildfire. And rightly so.
If we don’t stop the corporate world from further destroying the environment and putting much of the world in unhygienic living conditions full of disease and poverty, then all of us are in immediate danger ourselves. There is no gated community that will protect you no matter how many Border Walls get built.
Responding to these diseases must be done in a much more thoughtful way than in mere use of a nutty police mindset ‘Homeland Security’ model. Just yesterday, I was in a Colorado Springs community center where the ‘alert warning’ for terrorism was YELLOW. The public is being treated as if they were residents of a state institution for the mentally retarded, which is where they the Bush Klan seems to have gotten their 3 color scheme from!
We live in a world that needs much more effort than this US corproate governmental nonsense to address the real problems we all face. And yet I have not heard of one elected politician that has had the courage to call for the abolition of this nut case branch of the US government called the Department of Homeland Security.
Yes, we need ‘homeland security’, but with the corporate misleadership now running the country we’re not going to get it. Your average businessman at the upper levels is basically a corrupt buffoon. Most of them themselves need to be in jail unlike this young man now being held in a hospital in Atrizona. Speak out against this sort of abuse all you can. Before too long, you just might find yourself in the same sort of predicament.
More on the same theme, but this time not about conditions inside hospitals, but inside nursing homes instead. If this home is so observant about rats, imagine how they are about MRSA (Methicllin resistant Staph) and Vanco resistant diarrhea?
http://news.aol.com/topnews/articles/_a/dead-rat-found-in-seniors-mouth-suit/20070407004809990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001
We’ve all heard the stories about doctors unecessarily giving units of blood to patients in order to get them discharged sooner and about hospitals dumping patients off on skid row. What about the Department of Veterans Affairs? I have been shuffled about through the VA system and in the end was simply given a plethora of medications which don’t even solve the problems I sought to fix. The goal of the VA seems to be to provide the minimal treatment at the lowest cost and highest profit margin for drug companies.
James Nicholson, US Secretary of Veterans Affairs, was on PBS about two weeks trying to defend the reports concerning the horrid conditions at Walter Reed National Army Medical Center, whose slogan is “We Provide Soldier Care”. Is this what they call “care”? In the interview, he said that the VA had the best health care system in the country. Wow! No kidding?! Well just how hard is THAT! Considering what a mish-mash of marginal care we have in the US today, stating that you are the best is hardly any great boast. It’s a little like saying that you’re top student in a remedial social skills class. Micholson seemed to be in denial that there is any problem with the system. Many in the VA system acknowledge the underfunding.
President Bush has consistently undercut the VA’s proposed budget the last several years. One government website boasted that the president increased the VA budget 41% in the first five years since he took office. What they don’t say is that he also increased, the defense budget by 50%!
I just have to wonder what Secretary Nicholson is thinking.
About a year ago he appointed a new director for the Orlando VA Medical Center. See http://www1.va.gov/orlando/page.cfm?pg=2
This new director has an undergraduate degree in civil engineering and a masters in business administration. Exactly what does his background have to do with actual healthcare? Answer, none. Oh, yea, he’s a “Diplomate” of the American College of Healthcare Executives” (By the way, It seems that effective Jan. 1, 2007 “Diplomate” status was eliminated by the ACHE.) Given this lack of actual experience with actual care, it’s no surprise why the VA system has become so much like an assembly-line. Handing out medications that don’t work simple because the drug companies are some of the biggest supporters of both major political parties is not what I would call honoring the service of soldiers. What happened to treating people with the respect they deserve?
If, as Nicholson said, the VA is the best system in the US. it makes me glad I don’t have to go to one of those other health care systems that many in the United States likes to call the best in the world.
Lane, today’s Gazette had an article about a hospital in LA that took off the healthy testicle of one of its patients, instead of the bad one! This is not some odd ball problem at all. I once worked at a hospital in Oregon where they did a heart transplant, but forgot to type and cross the donor heart to the patiient! Can you imagine?
This particular hospital had me working as a temp from an agency, where I got sick while caring for one of their trach patients. I had a horrible bronchial infection as a result for about 3 weeks, but then returned to work there once again.
On about the third shift back, I had a horrilbe pain in my right shoulder and could hardly tolerate the pain. After I got off, the pain just got worse and worse, and the next day I was unable to lift my right arm up at all.
I never got any workman’s comp at all, and since I had no medical insurance, I essentially was left with a paralyzed arm thinking that I might be permanently unable to do any work in my profession ever again.
Luckily, after about 9 months, the other muscles in my arm began to substitutesome for the muscle where the nerve had died, and I was able to return to work. I had fallen victim to a nosocomial (hospital given) infection.
All in all, it was just another year in the ‘health care’ factories for me. But don’t call this medicine, PLEASE. It is an abomination instead, when even the health workers are not treated for their work acquired injuries as I wasn’t. Some ‘system’ indeed!
I recent;y heard of the case of a elderly woman in Pueblo who is suffering from numerous conditions and has needed round the clock care. She desired not to leave her home and so an agency was hired to provid staff members with onlth minimal amopunt of training as “home health aides”. Since that the agency was hired, the woman has lost nearly all mobility and must be turned every couple of hours. She has also become increasingly unable to speak and thus communicate to her caregivers and family. There have been numerous problems with the level of care including plain disregard for instructions given them by doctors and family members. Some of these include giving this poor woman food that she cannot properly digest. Staff members keep there food in the same refrigerator as the patient’s food and often give her things she should receive. They smoke cigarettes on the porch just outside her room and try to cover up the smell with potent sprays which irritate the patient. They have also, at the patients request done gardening and have excessively used herbicides on her garden which are then tracked back into the house.
You made me chuckle describing this home health agency. Last year I worked for one and I had to nickname it Marlboro Home Health due to the smoke inside the office when I would go in with the paperwork. Everybody on staff was a smoker there!
I have some bronchial asthma, too, so I dreaded going inside the office to do the necessary politic-chit-chat with the in-crowd, office people there, which was a totally necessary part of the job to keep from being sliced apart by all the gossip and games played by home health agencies.
VA hospitals around the country (not to mention the Medi-care and Medic-aid systems) illustrate what happens when the federal government is put in charge of the health care system. Sorry.
Medicare and Medicaid are all that props up the private system at this point. Plus, what would happen to the private sector without the VA taking care of who they do take care of, Marie? The private sector actually drains off our money, yet gives out very little care at all to the majority of us.
America is full of what I call ‘business hospitals’ that deliver very little real actual medical care, while concentrating mainly on the top end. The rest of us get dumped off and receive poor or little care at all. In short, we have a multi tiered delivery of care that is reminiscent of the uh… ‘justice system’, where dollars buy ‘treatment’ there, too.
No dollars, no treatment. Two-three levels of justice in America. Two-three levels of medical care. And the rules are different for each level. In short, the rich get taken care of, while the poor get screwed. The middle class gets it half and half.
As a health worker I have worked within all 3 tiered levels of ‘care’. And all three levels have absolutely huge defects in what they are doing. But the biggest defect is just being a tiered system in the first place, since not treating the poor well breeds infectious disease that all may be eventually exposed to and eventually die from.