Stuck in Bed for 19 Months, at Hospital’s Expense

[alp227]

ON Jan. 4, 2010, Raymond Fok was changing trains on his way to kidney dialysis treatment when he collapsed on the Canal Street subway platform. Emergency medical technicians examined him and took him by ambulance to the nearest hospital, New York Downtown, near the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Workers in the emergency room recorded that Mr. Fok’s speech was slurred and that he was lurching from side to side when he walked.

“He was a very typical hemorrhagic stroke,” said Jeffrey Menkes, the hospital’s president. From the emergency room, the hospital admitted Mr. Fok to the intensive-care unit on the third floor, where workers tried to find out more about their patient — not just his medical history, but his insurance or Medicaid status, his address, his Social Security or taxpayer identification number, the location of family members.

Once his condition had stabilized, the hospital moved him to a regular room on the fifth floor, where staff members expected to treat him for 7 to 10 days before discharging him to a sub-acute-care center for rehabilitation, the usual regimen for stroke victims.

(...)

In a city with a large immigrant population, it is not rare for hospitals to have one or more patients who, for reasons unrelated to their medical condition, do not seem to leave. At Downtown, where a bed costs the hospital more than $2,000 a day, there are currently three long-term patients who no longer need acute care but cannot be discharged because they have nowhere to go. The hospital pays nearly all costs for these patients’ treatment. One man left recently after a stay of more than five years.

(...)

RAYMOND FOK was born in Madagascar and grew up in Hong Kong, where he became a police officer. In 1988, he brought his wife and two young sons on what he told officials was a vacation in New York, and then never returned. Mr. Fok left some question about his reasons for overstaying the family’s tourist visas, repeating that he had feared Hong Kong’s approaching handover to the Chinese government, though at the time this was nine years away.

In New York he found a job at a vegetable market in Chinatown, earning $5 an hour to feed a family of four — and soon, with the birth of his daughter 18 years ago, five. A friend helped him rent an apartment in a heavily Chinese section of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and taught him to navigate the subways. But the friend refused to help him apply for permanent residence, Mr. Fok said.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/nyregion/stuck-in-bed-for-19-months-at-hospitals-expense.html?pagewanted=all

[Turbineguy]

1. These are rare

but extraordinarily expensive events. Only after a long time and a huge cost can we see the lack of common sense that leads to this.

Some years ago in Seattle a man stayed in a convalescent hospital for 18 months. He needed a wheelchair ramp at his house but the insurance would not pay for that. What they would pay for was his unnecessary confinement, indefinitely. Finally some neighbors got together and built a ramp and he went home.

[Name removed]

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