No you don’t, at least, not in Australia. Eventually you will need to produce a Medicare card and tell people who you are, but that’s all the the ID that will be required of you. And if you are in need of urgent treatment and have no ID (or Medicare card on you) you will be treated first and asked for identification afterwards.
Ah! The backpedal stroke, of Olympic quality.
even sven - serious question: if this Land of the Free gives you so much heartache and pain, why don’t you emigrate to someplace more to your liking?
This is not a love-it-or-leave-it demand – I’m simply curious. If I lived in a country that frustrated me so much, I’d at least consider whether I might find another, more hospitable home.
Feel free to talk about it… just don’t paint the entire country with a very ugly brush based on secondhand, drunken complaints. You don’t fucking well know that CASH was the reason he was turned away. For all we know, he was turned away for a completely different reason, and someone misheard the conversation.
For the umpteenth time, what was the name of the clinic? Was it the Santa Cruz Medical Foundation’s urgent care office on Soquel? If it is, I’m sure someone more local than me can ring them up and get their official policy. Then, at least, we can find out if this was an isolated fuckup.
In this entire story, there is only one crystal clear wrongdoing. The owner of the store refusing to put your friend under workman’s comp. That is illegal, and potentially contributed to the delay in treatment. Of course, since he’s a hippie, and “family” and an all around great guy, you will give him a 100% free pass on breaking the law and endangering your friend.
Personally, I love this explanation. “I don’t know exactly what happened, and I’m basing this on drunken ramblings, but none of that matters!”
It reminds me a little bit of the scene in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, in which the angry mob is trying to convince the lord of the manor to burn the witch. One peasant claims: “She turned me into a newt!”
The lord looks at the man, who is obviously not newt-like: “A newt?”
The peasant: " … I got better."
Actually, this was my job one summer. Weekend night shift at the local ER. Everyone who came in, no matter the circumstances, had to have the insurance forms filled out and entered into the computer. If they were whisked straight from the ambulance into a treatment room, I would have to either get this information from their family and/or friends, or wait for a break in the action when I could go in and ask the patient themselves. I hated that part.
If the patient was whisked directly from the ambulance to the OR, and no family or friends were available, we had to fill out the forms anyway, based on what they had in their wallet. If no wallet was found, we had “John Doe” packets already made up with default info to keep the computers happy.
papyrus correctes, omnes correctes.
Well, it would be a little more accurate if you said you live in a country where SOME clinics apparently do things like that. You live in a country where ONE clinic denied someone medical treatment because they didn’t like his form of payment.
I guess I could go off half-cocked and say I’m distraught to know I live in a country where college graduates get so overwhelmed by emotional protectiveness towards a injured friend that they’ll throw reason out the window. That college graduates will generalize after a single incident and draw conclusions about an entire industry.
But no, I live in a country where I know SOME college graduates who do that.
There are plenty of valid concerns about the health care system, worthy of rants and debate in GD. I’m just not seeing how this incident relates to those.
Considering that you yourself said your information comes secondhand from drunk people, and you really don’t know the whole story, there is no reason to believe that all the other parts are possibly unreliable (coming from drunks) but this part about “we don’t take cash” is true.
I for one no longer believe any part of the story at all. Just too many things that don’t add up.
Absolutely true - I have also been in hospitals like that. BUT what you describe is COMPLETELY different from having someone walk in, and being immediately told - without being seen - “Leave now, we don’t take cash.” You are saying that the injured party was either asked for his insurance info, or you asked a friend or family member, or made a best guess WHILE the injured party’s injuries were being looked at. That is not how Sven described her story.
I’m guessing that it wasn’t that place.
That clinic is located less than half a mile down the road from the real emergency room at Dominican Hospital but even sven has said that
Not that it matters much anyway, but in case anyone else has a similar worry: workers’ comp premiums are paid after the year is over - not in advance. The premiums are based on total compensation for the previous year. It’s not like someone at the company has an accident and next month the premium is higher and puts the company in a precarious financial position. One accident isn’t going to raise the premiums anyway.
As others have said: you don’t know WHY they really turned your friend away because, as YOU said: you were not there. I think it’s more likely they said they don’t take cash for a worker’s comp injury (which legally they proabably can’t). They probably would not have taken plastic either in your friend’s case.
Maybe you should get your facts straight before flying off the handle.
Or, perhaps, one might work within the country they were born in, raised in, and live in to get it to live up to it’s own stated ideals. As noted, by the reliable DoctorJ, medical ethics generally require an open clinic to either treat a patient or do what they can to see that the patient is seen by the appropriate medical venue if the injury is of a nature they can not deal with. Medical ethics are cost(especially form of payment)-independent.
Granted we may not be getting the story correct, it’s already third hand by the time even sven writes about it, but if the basic facts are correct then the prevailing medical ethic for care in the US seems to have been breached. What is wrong with working to correct such breaches? If the system was set up to allow, even encourage such breaches of ethical behavior then I might consider going somewhere with a different system, but I fail to see why “pack up and move” even belongs on the table at this point. A single instance of a clinic failing to live up to the general ethical standards does not make the whole country a hostile environment.
Enjoy,
Steven
Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that. I pay a monthly WC premium based on pretax earnings of my employees (minus any pretax health insurance deductions). Each employee job has it’s own base rate , and this is dependent on the natural dangers of each occupation (cheap for office workers, expensive for construction workers and all jobs inbetween). On top of all that, you have an experience modification percentage (also known as Ex-Mod) which reflects your company’s WC usage. The Ex-Mod is dependent on a three-year period of WC claims that your company experienced, but it has a time lag built into it.
Example:
for the calendar year 2005, your WC Ex-Mod is based on the claims (and their overall costs for Medical and Lost Wages Compensation) for the calendar years of 2001, 2002, and 2003. The claims for 2004 do not count yet (this is the lag I’m talking about) until the calendar year of 2006. For 2006, your base years are 2002, 2003, and 2004. So, the claims for 2001 fall off and the claims for 2004 are added on for the 2006 calculation for the Ex-Mod.
Over our company’s 13 year period, I personally have had my Ex-Mod as high as 190% (more money in claims paid out than premium paid in) and as low as 74% (more premium paid in than claims paid out). Some claims were definitely legitimate, some were questionable and others were subrogated when another party was at fault for my employee’s injury. I have had an active role in decreasing my WC costs, by taking the injured employee to my WC doctor in all first visits after an injury. That alone is a huge money saver, because all three of us (employee, doctor and the employer) are all on the same page about the nature of the injury, the correct treatment, and whether the employee can return to work or be on modified duty and still work. I have seen and heard of companies with Ex-Mods of over 400%, and the main reason for this is the employer’s lack of participation in the involvement of the employee’s treatment and work status. For me, it’s saved tens of thousands of dollars per year, and I’m only a small company (60 employees). Large corporations are probably losing millions for not being active in the WC system.
And woe to those who don’t have any WC insurance. Fines and jail time await for the worst of offenders, and if someone is giving an employee cash to go get medical attention, that is a sure sign that the owner is not carrying WC insurance.
Let me also address the problem that even sven’s friend (might have) experienced. Usually if you go to a clinic with an non-life threating injury/illness, doctor’s office, ER or other treatment center, one of the questions usually asked by the receptionist is “Is this a work related injury or not?”. If the person responds that it is a work-related injury, then the receptionist expects to see some sort of written notification from the employer (or a verbal on the phone) stating the company that the employee works for, the WC group insurance account # and authorization to treat the injury. If the receptionist does not get this authorization, then they have the option of treating the injury (especially if it is life-threatening) anyway and then try to get the information from the employer later, or they will probably tell the employee that they need the authorization before they can treat. So I doubt that the friend could use the cash, or use a check or credit card or anything else at that point. He was probably told by the reception to go back and get the authorization, or have the employer call the office with a verbal authorization. This is different that being “refused” treatment by a doctor’s office; it was not proper protocal for a work-related injury being paid by cash. I believe one or two other posters here have already said that, and I am reaffirming that.
Is that supposed to explain it all away? If I were in that situation, I wouldn’t be any less angry knowing that they were legally unable to treat me; I’d just direct my anger at the law instead of the person behind the desk.
Look, if you come into a clinic with your finger gushing blood, and they turn you away because they’re afraid it’d be illegal to treat you, then we’re dealing with a seriously fucked up law.
I just answered this…the person to blame is the employer, not the law, not the receptionist, not the doctor. When the employer is aware of the injury they have a duty to arrange the medical treatment through WC if it’s not life-threatening or call 911 if it is. The employer is not following the law, and it’s interfering with the treatment for the injured employee.
So it would be better for said clinic to treat you illegally and get fined or maybe shut down for breaking the law? They won’t be treating many patients at all that way, will they? It’s not the clinics fault - the fault for this whole thing rests on one entity: the employer who elected to break the law, for whatever reason they decided to do so.
And I rather doubt it was a life threatening injury or they would have treated and worked out the details later. As others have stated - maybe they weren’t equipped to deal with this type of injury. Maybe the assessed the situation and realised the man could safely get somewhere else and didn’t want to get involved in a legal battle with WC issues. Who knows? We don’t have enough information to take any to task except the employer.
Regardless of what his employer did wrong, this guy with the sliced-up finger should still have gotten treatment. The employer is clearly at fault, but if the clinic refused to treat him because it would’ve been illegal, the law is also at fault.
No, it would be better for the law to be changed so clinics don’t have to fear getting shut fined or shut down for treating people who come in with machete wounds.
I would agree. But we have nothing but assumptions that that is what happened.
I, for one, do not believe he was turned away in the manner the OP descibes. I also do not believe that the wound was as serious as the OP suggests.
I think it’s all bullshit. Maybe not sven’s bullshit. Maybe he was just the guy who passed it on. But it’s still bullshit. At the very least, until sven actually sees the wound and still claims severed arteries and severed nerves. Until then, I cannot believe that a medical office saw a man gushing blood and didn’t try to offer some kind of aid…if only to call an ambulance and wrap it in some gauze.
The above quotes were taken from several different posts. I grouped them together because I’m stupid and lazy.