“Get it all the way up or you can’t be admitted to this hospital!”
[I don’t have permission to tell this story, so I have to tweak it into a parable.]
What the dickens has happened to our medical service delivery system? (Hint: Obamacare happened.) What do you think of a hospital where they tell you, “Sorry, you’re too sick to be admitted”? Or “too weak.” Like, “If you can’t clean and jerk 150 pounds, you can’t get treatment here.”
I grant that some parts of the country will have better hospitals than others. It’s a big country, there’s bound to be a lot of variation. Even so, there ought to be a bottom floor that no one’s going to sink through!
When I was a boy, doctors made house calls. If you got sick, you stayed in bed and the family physician came over to examine you and prescribe a treatment. Why did that system have to change? What was wrong with it? Why is it better to drag your ailing carcass through a sleet storm, sit for 90 minutes in a doctor’s waiting room, and then get packed off to a hospital where they won’t admit you because you’re too sick?
Yes, I know people to whom this has happened. Are we still in the United States of America? It’s starting to sound like a socialist hell-hole.
I had very minor surgery a few years back, and was subjected to a litany of harsh questions, asking whether I was experiencing domestic abuse. The fact that I lived alone didn’t seem to make much of an impression. My feeling was that the particular nurse involved simply thought that her judgment was so superior that she had the right to treat other adults as if they were petulant children.
Did they get around to asking if your house was haunted?
They didn’t, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if they had.
That says a lot about our society. If life is no longer sacred … words fail me.
Yes, going to a hospital is one of the worst things we can do. I know, since I’ve been in one
three times recently, and if I didn’t want the treatment they suggested, then I was immediately sent home. Not that I objected going home, but all I got out of the visits were plenty of bills.
*Sigh*
I’d say it’s still better than our “free” and “universal” healthcare. Euthanasia has become a leasing cause of death. Forget treating people! Too expensive! Better to just put them down. Homeless? MAiD. A vet with PTSD? MAiD. Depressed and suicidal? MAiD. But not if you are an indigenous trans woman with bottom surgery so botched and so constantly painful, death is actually requested, but denied.
Better living through government micromanagement of Everything!
Leading cause. Not leasing. *sigh*
We know.
Again, it is where you live. Here in Fort Smith, Ark, population of 90,000 we have two large hospitals, a third ER facility, and Urgent Care centers all over the place. The people helping me beat Stage 4 Cancer are wonderful. Thankfully I have top-notch insurance otherwise I would be in deep trouble.
Thank the LORD for that!
Some hospitals are much better than others but there’s more than enough horror stories going around to hope that I or my family never have to go to one (I know — the impossible dream).