Hospitals: The New Law Enforcement Agencies!

by B.J. on 8/03/2008 11:11:00 AM 0 comments Print this post

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"What that does for us, it puts a strain on our system, where we're unable to provide adequate care for our own citizens," said Alan Kelly, vice president of Scottsdale Healthcare in Arizona

These US health care facilities seem to take the Hippocratic oath of "do no harm" to new unprecedented and broader levels each time I read about them in the news.

Characteristic of this culture of consumption and wasting, the new thing seems to be all about dumping patients.

First, stories of dumping patients on skid row in LA.


Now, hospitals are actually carrying out deportations.


"Many American hospitals are taking it upon themselves to repatriate seriously injured or ill immigrants because they cannot find nursing homes willing to accept them without insurance."


It's an American institution, if you can't find a way to fix the problem, you waste lots of resources to "dump" the "problem" elsewhere and have them fix it.

This is kind of like how Los Angeles County will soon run out of landfill space, and as of 2009 ship their trash over 200 miles by rail over to Brawley, CA never to deal with it again.

Hospitals seemingly running out of nursing home or rehab space, will go out of their way to ship their patients via plane to what appears to be their own country never to deal with them again.

The company line on these deportations seems to be the following:
1) immigrants take up our resources
2) nursing homes and rehab programs won't take them because they are uninsured
3) were federally regulated to put uninsured patients on Medicaid in "appropriate" care, so basically were trapped! Help!


1) The irony is that we already do a good job of taking other people's resources, but their complaints are never really taken into account. Naturally, when you take something away from people forcibly and without their mass consent, they will probably want to get things back. It's pretty much a social version of kharma.

Whether its logging, deforesting, mining, oil drilling, declaring war, it's probably safe to assue that were in some other country with borders, making agreements with people who run their countries like drug cartels, essentially stealing people's stuff for profit.

Wasting of resources? Americans already consume 25% of the world's electricity being only 5% of the world's population. It's vomit-inducing everytime someone says that "immigrants are consuming our resources" A lot of Americans do not have the right to EVER say this without being massively hypocritical.

The only thing is that our consumption and waste of world and other country's stuff never enters people's imagination unless they are dedicated environmentalists and can be safely identified eco-nuts.

2) What gets me is that according to these hospitals, deporting them is such a costly adventure.

In spite of costly litigation issues, cost of the flight, they still go through with it anyway! Twisted inspirational proof that even with limited funds as hospitals have, you can sort of make what you want happen, happen.

They've long violated the Hippocratic Oath when

It seems like a case where these hospital administrators are taking the opportunity to absolve themselves of responsibility, perhaps make an ideological statement while appearing to hold up to federal and ethical standards.

This issue in particular, of undocumented people in long-term health care, doesn't appear to be one of purely economics. The hospitals are not dealing with such an overwhelming amount of immigrants, that these immigrants are being ignored and falling through the cracks because there aren't many of these cases in the first place. Since the patients in these situations require long-term care, they aren't exactly patients that doctors can mindlessly sift through.

Judging from the quotes of one of the representative hospital administrators and the trends of hospitals who are more likely to deport immigrants, it doesn't appear to be cases of unintentional uncontrollable decisions, but actually rather calculated and intentional.

As usual, there's either a profit and/or ideologically-flawed Americanist mechanism at work. At any rate, the lack of care given to him is based solely on artifical, human-created boundary lines.

If a visitor from another planet were to assess our political stage, he'd probably seize upon that the concept: Artifical, human-created imaginary boundary lines.

Lines that only exist because humans decided that they need exist as if nothing of meaning happens outside those boundaries and nothing will benefit from it either.

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