My parents, between them, required treatment for:
In total they spent months in hospitals and had several major surgeries. This cost precisely nothing.
I thought Straight Dope posters were supposed to fight ignorance. :smack:
Actually, it cost thousands and thousands of pounds. It just wasn’t paid for directly by your parents.
Don’t get me wrong; i’m a firm believer in a single-payer health system. But health care is expensive, and someone always ends up footing the bill, even if it’s not immediately obvious who that is.
Oh, no, silly–it’s obvious who is to blame: Bill and his blowjob. That always seem to lie at the heart of any of this kind of nonsense…
I’d rather spread those thousands of pounds out over millions of people than have people go bankrupt from medical bills like they do here in the good ole USA.
Ex-EMT checks in
We had a couple of facilities here that do not accept walk ins and are not licenced, insured or equipped to operate an ER. IIRC they could actually be fined for checking someone in without an MD referral. These are not hospitals in the sense we generally think of them. They might look like one superficially but they are not for any legal purpose wrt emergencies. One of them here is basically a big short stay surgical center, they have staff on 24/7 but that is just to care for the people who are there overnight or recovering from late afternoon procedures. If you staggered in off the street without a life threatening problem the most they would probably do is call a cab for you.
Oh, we’ve taken care of that.
The Bankruptcy ‘Reform’ bill passed a couple of years ago protects banks, insurance companies, and big hospitals from this by no longer allowing people to file bankruptcy due to medical bills.
This is my favourite part. There’s a clinic in my neighourhood that I won’t go to because the staff are incredibly, actively unprofessional, and they have a big sign front and centre that states that “ABUSE OF STAFF WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.” Gee, wonder why you needed to put that sign up. Maybe because your staff were pissing people off all the time?
Anyway, good for you for doing the right thing. As a nurse in a hospital, even if it wasn’t one set up for emergencies, the correct answer when confronted with an injured, out-of-it, little old lady is not “Not my problem. Next!”
It seems to me that you should at least be able to expect this non-emergency hospital to do what any grocery store or petrol station would do: check on the lady, bring her inside, make her as comfortable as possible and call an ambulance for her.
Clinics often serve a less than warm and fuzzy clientele. Hyperbole aside, IME this type of sign is very common.
Reread my post carefully. Lacking proper licensure = big deal. If this person was in a life threatening situation they are required by their licence to act, however medical facility operations are not always the most intuitive and or customer friendly things.
I just wanted to say that this may be the single most perfectly crafted post I’ve ever seen on the Dope. Concise, sparse, informative, clearly well thought out without being anally over-analyzed. Chez Guevara, you should write English styled hard boiled fiction!
I think you missed the point entirely. :eek:
Thanks to the UK National Health Service, my elderly parents didn’t have to find a lot of money when they were seriously ill.
**Of course we all know how it is funded ** :smack: - you can see the deductions on any payslip. Since my parents both worked for decades, they **did indeed pay part of the cost ** - do you not know that? 
But obviously ralph124c has no idea what is going on, which is why I posted the details.
A few days ago, an elderly lady went missing in the next town while driving to see her friend down the street. She was spotted asking for directions in two places far apart, one a couple of miles from my house, but no one on the spot realized just how lost she was. Flyers went up all over town. Her body was discovered about 36 hours ago, near her car. She wasn’t dressed for cold weather and had simply driven around for a couple of days until she couldn’t any more.
So, Chez Guevara, it’s nice to hear a story with a happy ending, despite the horrible nurse.
Actually, I was expecting this part of the story to go:
You, to Arm Guy: “It’s not just me, is it?”
Arm Guy: “Nope. Right rotten bitch, she is.”
You, to Nurse: “So I make it two to one.”
I just to add that, although you might minimize it, Chez, you did a very good deed.
In younger days I was involved in search and rescue and it very often involved chasing after victims with Alzheimer’s disease. This took an enormous amount of time, resources, and often ended with very bad outcomes for the person we were looking for to the frustration of everyone involved.
In retrospect what you did seems obvious, but a large number of people could easily just rationalize doing nothing because they weren’t sure of what they saw, weren’t sure of what to do, or figured that someone else would resolve the problem.
What exactly do you mean by this, MizGrand?
(emphasis mine)
I understand all of the above. Even the underlined portion. If the facility in question operates under the rules you outline above, though, the underlined portion still kicks in. Not letting Chez use a phone? Absolutely frickin’ uncalled for. Especially when someone mentions decreased motor skills and lowered state of consciousness. Especially given that Nurse #2 was able to take the lady in.
I think you’d actually find it more satisyfing to come across the nurse lying in the street… and then just run her over.
That is just about the saddest thing I’ve ever read.
It is really sad. It’s not that people didn’t care or wouldn’t help her, it’s that the people who saw her didn’t realize she needed help. I’m sure they feel terrible. A lot of people were on the lookout for her, but by the time we saw the flyers I think it might have already been too late.
That’s right! I had forgotten. Those lousy cheats, trying to beat the system…this law’ll show them. (we truly have an effed system of government sometimes, no?)
And here is THE reason I worked the past 6 years: to provide health insurance for my family. Oh, the money was darned handy, no denying that, but it was the inexpensive family coverage (eye, and dental and orthodontic, as well as health care much cheaper through my hospital job than through my husband’s workplace) that kept me staff there–6 years of hell. Pure hell. But I digress…