Honestly -

[kyburg]

March 5 (Bloomberg) -- The shortcomings in outpatient treatment that were exposed at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington exist throughout the military health-care system, Representative John Tierney said today during a hearing at the center.

Shame on me for quoting Bloomberg. But honestly.

What was your first clue?

What makes you think care under the VA system - which is a 'benefit', not insurance and they'll be very quick to tell you that at the door - would be much better than the care anyone gets walking into a facility today?

You've been the ER lately - within two years or less. Everyone does - tell me.

How long did you have to wait? Six hours? Longer?

Left AMA before you got care? Sure you did. You probably went home, treated it yourself and scheduled an office visit. You could. Faster.

Get hit with a huge bill, even if you did get seen? Sure you did. Particularly if you did not have insurance, and were you referred out perhaps at the same time to the county facility? Oh, and if you think the VA is short on funds and staff, you ought to try the tax-paid-for facilities that are there to act as the safety net.

We're back to the days before hospitals were considered the place one went by choice to get well.

MRSA? Ever heard of it? No? Go google it. Scared now? Entirely facility born, bred and maintained.

Talk about your elephant in the living room.

Hey. Remember all those wonderful trauma centers? Know where your nearest one is? Or if you even HAVE one? (You in Florida? No. You don't have one. Anywhere. Disney World and everything, and not ONE trauma center in the whole state.)

You get hit on the I15 on the California side of the border between Nevada and California, on your way to Las Vegas. You'll be airlifted to Loma Linda...that's just South and East of San Bernardino.

Hope the helicopter don't crash. Of course, that's after a unit finds you, which could be up to two hours.

Pro-life, my butt.

You know, I think all of this brougha is very nice, but you know something? This isn't symptomatic of the military insofar as our whole healthcare system has been underfunded to the point of failure for decades.

I doubt Walter Reed has to meet JCAHO requirements, being a military facility - that whole 'benefit' thing again, they don't bill Medicare.

This isn't even as easy as taking candy from babies. You're sick and disabled? You're invisible. Oh, until someone makes a news story over it - everyone clucks a bit, people get fired and maybe...maybe someone gets their wrists slapped.

When...WHEN...are we going to ever ACKNOWLEDGE THIS IS A PROBLEM? Change? Oh, that's what you need for the soda machine downstairs.

rrrrr.

Comments

sputtering at some length...

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

My sister (more details in another comment below) stayed in one hospital locally where the cleaning staff complained bitterly to the patients about cutbacks in *how much soap* they were allowed to use on their mops for the floors and for cleaning toilets. They told *me* that the amount they used to use for one floor now had to do four floors. Why? Cost cutbacks by the administration.
I kid you not.
It was not a sanitary place, and to blame it on the cleaning staff is absurd. They tried very hard to do the job anyway, they *knew* what a difference it made, long before resistant staph had been diagnosed anywhere.
Similarly, a cousin's wife back east picked up resistant staph infection in the bones of her spine in a nursing home where the toilets weren't cleaned for the entire three weeks she was there. The infection (by then in another facility) eventually killed her.
My aunt worked for a health care system in the Midwest where the officers of the corporation ransacked the pension fund and all the other assets they could lay hands on in about 18 months, abandoned the company, and took off. (The head pharmacist was running his own fiddles where he had underlings substitute placebos for major drugs like Taxol, goodness only knows where he found to resell the pilfered goods by the truckload, and he left with the rest of the crooks.) Employees found out, a little late, this was the fourth major hospital chain these robbers had bankrupted by buying the company, gutting its assets, and vanishing. There seemed to be no enforcement and no oversight to stop them doing it again in another state, and nobody much interested in preventing it. The pension fund was gone, nobody is ever going to reimburse anybody on the loss. When multimillion dollar companies are run the way Enron was (and worse) then a petty matter of lawsuits over failing to use soap on the floors is of little or no concern.
When nursing home inspectors hit any given facility out here maybe once every ten years, if that, you can be sure the really greedy owners are not paying out for more nurses and janitors to keep the residents in good shape.
That's entirely aside from legitimate companies whose medical malpractice liability insurance is skyrocketing and those county-run facilities groaning under state and federal funding cutbacks of draconian proportions while serving a growing population of sicker local people who are getting priced out of any housing they can afford on minimum wages.
This system has feedback loops of enormous proportions.