Law would criminalize homeless 'dumping' (Hollywood Presbyterian)

[struggle4progress]

2/22/2007, 6:47 p.m. PT
The Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A hospital said Thursday that procedures "were not strictly followed" when a van driver left a discharged paraplegic man crawling on Skid Row this month, and steps will be taken to improve services for the homeless.

The statement by Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center came as local and state officials, responding to a series of incidents, unveiled a bill that would make it a crime for hospitals to discharge homeless patients on streets ...

Authorities have had trouble building criminal cases against medical providers because there isn't a state law that specifically prohibits leaving patients on the streets. The legislation would make it a misdemeanor to leave patients anywhere other than their residences without their informed consent ...

http://www.oregonlive.com/newsflash/national/index.ssf?/base/national-80/1172199252119910.xml&storylist=ornational

[struggle4progress]

1. ‘Dumping’ of Homeless by Hospitals Stirs Debate (NYT)

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: February 23, 2007

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 22 — For a year, reports have surfaced that hospitals here have left homeless patients on downtown streets, including a paraplegic man wearing a hospital gown and colostomy bag who witnesses say pulled himself through the streets with a plastic bag of his belongings held in his teeth.

Now, prosecutors are hoping a bill introduced last week in the State Senate will give them stronger legal firepower to charge the hospitals.

Of the 55 or so reports of “patient dumping,” principally in the dilapidated quarter known as Skid Row, only a handful are being investigated for criminal activity, said Rocky Delgadillo, the city attorney. Only one hospital has been charged, using a misdemeanor count that has never been tested in court.

The problem is that while California state law requires hospitals to have written procedures outlining follow-up care for patients, it does not expressly prohibit leaving them on the street ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/us/23dumping.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[Kutjara]

2. Something needs to be done about this problem.

Many hospitals in "nice" L. A. neighborhoods take their "undesirable" patients and dump them on Skid Row. On a BBC investigation I saw last year, the documentary crew filmed an ambulance dump a guy in the street, dressed only in a hospital gown.

I don't know if this law will fix the problem though. If the hospitals know that they'll be stuck with a homeless patient, they may just refuse treatment in the first place.

[youngdem]

8. Can't refuse treatment in the first place...COBRA law already in place to prevent that

The loophole is the dumping.

Criminalize the dumping and make the hospital administrators criminally responsible under the statute and this will cease.

[Robbien]

9. Which just puts hospitals and the homeless in a worse bind

Why would a hospital voluntarily treat anyone who is uninsured when they know they cannot discharge the patient after treatment. Hospitals will just say they do not have the capacity, which would be true since they could not discharge the treated homeless.

[youngdem]

14. It ISN'T voluntary to treat someone

It is a law (with SERIOUS consequences) called COBRA that requires ALL emergency rooms to take ALL emergencies, at least to stabilize and transfer. They CANNOT refuse to treat you, unless the injury is EXTREMELY minor, and in practice, NO decent hospital refuses to treat anyone because they rightly fear litigation should someone be turned away and later die.

The conduct of these hospitals dumping people shows a loophole. These doctors and administrators are NOT going to jeopardize their licenses and businesses by breaking a felony law against dumping. It will just force MORE hospitals to join the chorus calling for SOME kind of universal coverage/single payer/required insurance.

Dumping patients should simply be a felony with mandatory jail time for those that order it, those that act it out, and to a lesser extent, anyone who knows about it and doesn't report it, just like child or elder abuse. Abuse of the impaired should not be tolerated.

[gorbal]

19. They don't allow "Dumping" where I'm at

And for the most part the system works quite well.

[pennylane100]

3. So when some stupid brain-dead right winged nut job

tells you that America is the greatest country in the world, ask them why we are dropping half naked, sick patients with tubes attached to them onto the streets of skid row in one of our richest cities.

[Judi Lynn]

5. It will be a pleasure to do that. Idiots. Thank you for the idea. n/t

[Hekate]

6. Don't forget to mention the old woman that was left wandering in a hospital gown...

...last year. Just dropped her off on Skid Row without trying to track down her next of kin upon discharge from the hospital. That was another incident caught on security cameras.

The usual excuse is that Skid Row is where the homeless and indigent can find all the services they need in one handy location. But that is the worst kind of cold-hearted BS when the helpless are abandoned on sidewalks, not even taken indoors and handed over to other human beings.

This practice is not confined to just this one hospital. :argh:

Hekate

[WernhamHogg]

15. "They deserve it"

Sadly, most of the nut jobs on the right believe that people "deserve" to be treated that way. If a person is homeless, right wingers believe that person is lazy and/or a drug addict and should just be thankful that they were treated at all. That's how right wing "logic" works.

[Pastiche423]

16. Where was the paraplegic's wheelchair?

They dumped a man that could not walk on a sidewalk? How fucking cruel can they be?

This terrifies me.

[struggle4progress]

4. Credit for U.S. journal article at issue

A leader of a Hollywood hospital's parent firm was listed as the fertility piece's main author. But a fellow Korean says it's a copy of his thesis.

By Charles Ornstein, Times Staff Writer
February 18, 2007

A prominent fertility scientist whose firm owns Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles is embroiled in a plagiarism dispute that straddles two continents, has triggered legal battles in South Korea and has raised questions about the practices of a leading U.S. fertility journal.

Dr. Kwang-Yul Cha, whose company also owns fertility clinics and a large hospital in Seoul, is listed as the primary author on a medical paper that appeared in December 2005 in the U.S. medical journal Fertility and Sterility.

But that paper appears to be nearly a paragraph-for-paragraph, chart-for-chart copy of a junior researcher's doctoral thesis, which appeared in a Korean medical journal nearly two years earlier, according to a Times review of both papers and the findings of a Korean medical society ...

Cha, 54, has received international accolades for his work on egg freezing and is well known in medical circles in South Korea. But in the United States, he is a somewhat controversial figure. He came under criticism a few years ago for his involvement in a study suggesting that anonymous prayers from strangers might double a woman's chances of fertility ...

http://ktla.trb.com/news/la-me-research18feb18,0,1578382.story?coll=ktla-news-1

<edit: replaced duplicate story by another>

[salin]

7. brief mention of the bill on NPR this morning.

[dkf]

10. Bill should include facilities for hospitals to drop homeless

at. What is a hospital supposed to do with a homeless person? Seems to me the government needs to provide for those that have no place to live.

[rebel with a cause]

12. Well, for one thing they can dress them before releasing them.

I was not homeless, but I was a patient last year in a hospital and attached to a catheter following being in a coma. Two days before my release, the nurses were ordered to remove the catheter so my body would have time to adjust and they could know if it did adjust. Needless to say the nurses did not want to deal with the accidental releases that would happen when the tubing was first removed, so they did not remove the tubing until a few minutes before my release from the hospital.

There I was, unable to walk on my own and with no control over my own bodily functions and being released to be on my own. If I had been homeless, or even going to a home where I would be alone, I would have been left to deal with this problem. Luckily for me, I had enough brain cells still functioning that I demanded to be taken to a special care facility for a limited time. It only took me a week to get to where I had regained most of my bladder control and was able to walk the short distance needed to get from one room to another (like the bathroom) and I was able to return home. Going to a nursing home for even a week was not a positive experience for me, but I felt I had no choice in it. Our health care system sucks as it is.

[lonestarnot]

11. Unreal that this isn't already law.

[NI4NI]

13. WTF? Reckless Endangering doesn't apply here?

not too mention basic human compassion and decency! Totally unfrickin' believable to know a "hospital" did this.

[lonestarnot]

18. Yes and when you get passed the "unfrickin belieavable to know a 'hospital' did this," then

one realizes this should already be criminal behavior on the hopital's actions, but apparently it is not per the OP.

[gorbal]

17. Is skid row the same as it use to be? worse?

I used to have to walk by skidrow in the middle of the night to change buses. (I worked in Westwood, lived in Highland Park)And the memory of it is burned into my consciouness. Just a line of the most desolate, obvioulsy mentally ill souls just endlessly walking back and forth. I went off my usual path into the thick of it one night and I thought I had entered the ninth plane of hell.

Can somebody do something for me, something I wish I had had the resources to do when I lived in LA. Can somebody, kindly, take a video camera to skid row at night and just film it. Then, (if it's still as bad as it used to be) please put it on Youtube, and share it online with anyone and everone and title it something like "THIS IS AMERICA". We have the power here; if we make them see this they can't ignore it.