Universal Health Care: Critical Patients Turned Away

Sad but perhaps a harbinger of things to come with a universal health care plan in place in America. This one from Japan courtesy of the National Center for Public Policy Research. Age sixty-nine, stable vital signs but ultimately allowed to bleed to death after an accident. No hospital would accept him under the nationalized plan. Call it death panels, cost control, or whatever you want. In the end you see the same result - a life lost. And it's far from the only one.

Rescue workers in Japan called fourteen hospitals before finding one that would take an elderly bicyclist who collided with a motorcycle.

The accident, which occurred at 10:15 pm in the Japanese city of Itami, left the 69-year-old bicyclist, who was not identified, in critical condition with back and head injuries. Paramedics arrived on the scene five minutes after the crash and administered first aid. Yet, for about an hour, they were unsuccessful at locating a hospital to treat the man.

Helpless, the elderly man waited in the ambulance at the accident scene as hospital after hospital rejected treating him, citing unavailable beds, staff shortages and a lack of equipment and specialists. All told, fourteen hospitals in the neighboring prefectures - i.e., governing districts - of Hyogo and Osaka refused his entry.

Comments

[WBestPresidentEver]

That is sad. Very sad. I cannot begin to imagine that happening here in the USA.

[Lala]

Maybe they can get together with the Irish.

Irish surgeons paid 1 million for doing nothing

http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Irish-surgeons-paid-1-million-for-doing-nothing-69366482.html

[Ad rem]

Heck, kill off everyone over 60....no Social Security to pay out, and no costs for incurring lingering illness. Give it all to an incoming hoard of illegal immigrants...ever beholding, and gung-ho on voting Democrat. Sounds like a plan!

[Bob]

Yes, nothing bad ever happens in our medical system here even though tens of millions of Americans have no health insurance and can't afford regular care. Our system is so perfect and trouble-free that it would be the equivalent of a Nazi death camp to tamper with it in any way. Anybody who can't get healthcare here is just a loser anyway. They deserve to die, or at least live in misery. Losers.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/aug/21/healthcare-provision-us-uk

"Beth Gabaree . . . has experiences that sound extreme but are in fact quite typical. She has diabetes and a heart condition. Until two years ago they were controlled through ongoing treatment paid for by her husband's work-based health insurance. But he was in a motorbike crash that pulverised his right leg and put him out of work.

That Catch 22 again: no work, no insurance, no treatment. Except in this case it was Beth who went without treatment, in order to put her husband's dire needs first. He receives ongoing specialist care that costs them $500 a go, leaving nothing for her. So she stopped seeing a doctor, and effectively began self-medicating. She cut down from two different insulin drugs to regulate her diabetes to one, and restricted her heart drugs. "I do what I think I need to do to keep four steps out of hospital. I know that's not the right thing, but I can't justify seeing the doctor when my family's already in money trouble."

The problem is that she hasn't kept herself four steps out of hospital. Her health deteriorated and earlier this year she became bedridden. Even then, it took her family several days to persuade her to go to the emergency room because she didn't want to incur the hospital costs. "It was hard enough without that," she says."

[gary gulrud]

"Our system is so perfect and trouble-free that it would be the equivalent of a Nazi death camp to tamper with it in any way."

We note that the media actually digging up and reporting these sad tales of woe, people falling through the cracks, are the British media. Not that they would have any ulterior motive regaling their subscribers with our system's inadequacies.

So what if they have to pull their own teeth, at least no sneering accounts payable correspondence fills their mailbox.

The news from Japan surprises me as they have a higher standard of living and are comparative hypochondriacs. The debate here is: why should we make our system worse on every front for the sake of a forest of trees?