Bush America - Hospitals Sent Homeless to Skid Row

[FormerRepublican]

"Paper: Hospitals Sent Homeless to Skid Row

LOS ANGELES - Three hospitals acknowledge putting discharged homeless patients into taxicabs and sending them to the downtown skid row area, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Representatives of Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles and Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center said they were helping patients because skid row offers them their best chance of getting services and shelter.

Patients are sent to skid row only if they are healthy enough, the representatives said.

"One of the challenges is that there are very few places that will take patients coming out of the hospital, even when they are medically cleared," said Mehera Christian, a spokeswoman for Kaiser Permanente Metro Los Angeles. "There are just a scarce number of places in the community to assist our homeless."

-snip-

Police Capt. Andy Smith said patients don't always reach their destinations, and that he often sees "individuals with not one but sometimes two different hospital bracelets, and people with bandages on, people who are barely ambulatory, and we'll end up calling an ambulance. Sometimes they are in such bad shape they are incoherent."

http://tinyurl.com/8nrxb

Now not only do the homeless get dumped in the streets, but now they're dumped with oozing, festering surgical wounds and hospital mistreatment. Welcome to Bush America, where the poor are encouraged to die in the streets.

And just in case you don't believe this madness, let me relate an experience of mine here in Utah. I have severe PTSD because I was a crime victim. I ended up in the hospital a while back in the middle of a PTSD crisis, the doctor gave me medication that almost killed me, and while I was messed up from the drugs the doctor had given me (to the point that I couldn't care for myself), I was dumped in the street because I was "homeless." The irony? I wasn't homeless. Makes me feel real comfortable knowing our returning soldiers with PTSD will be treated like "heros" when they come back to Utah. :sarcasm:

If you're sick or poor, you're not a person in Bush America.

[Warpy]

1. Well, if they'd sent them to Beverly Hills

they'd have been arrested for screwing up the scenery. Skid Row has soup kitchens and flops, at the very least.

Every street person out there will tell you he does better in working class areas than he does in fancy suburbs or the financial district.

[FormerRepublican]

2. I think the point is - they're not getting to shelter.

They're ending up in the streets with unhealed wounds from hospital procedures. Why is this a problem? Because infection rates when you're living in the streets is VERY high - in short, it's pretty close to a guarantee that you'll end up with complications and or dead.