My grandmother had a heart attack the other day and had to be brought to the emergency room. My mother went to visit her today and told me that the hallways were full of ER patients. While I wasn’t there to see for myself, you would think this kind of thing would only happen after a natural disaster or some other kind of mass casualty event.
Why were the hallways stuffed with patients without their own rooms? It turns out that, during the past few years, at least 5 hospitals within the broader area had shut down, with no new ones were built to replace them. The profit motive has driven the healthcare administrator ghouls to give up even the pretense that they’re able to offer timely care.
Death to Amerikkka!
About a year ago I was vomiting uncontrollably throughout the night. To the point there was nothing left but I still was hunched over the toilet bowl dry heaving, barely able to breathe between spits of vile.
Went to the emergency room at 3am, waited 6 hours, and not a single person around me was called to see a doctor.
I think my anger cured me because I ended up having enough energy to leave around 9am. I still got a $500 bill in the mail a month later because I wrote my name down and a virtual nurse did my intake form.
Burn it all down.
The hospital system in the US is crumbling from so many angles but the main issue is because they need to make a profit and they can’t.
Hospitals only really make money on big complicated expensive surgeries. Everything else is getting subsidized by surgeries. Only the big prestigious places like the Mayo clinic can actually do their jobs right because they make so much money on the groundbreaking procedures. All the other hospitals are overinvesting in their surgery departments while everything else is understaffed.
Chronic understaffing is self perpetuating, because it stresses out your existing staff into either wanting higher wages or leaving. Many nurses are just quitting the field entirely. So now not only are people deliberately understaffing but they’ve also managed to shrink the labor pool as well.
The final reason is of course the insurance industry. Not only to patients get screwed when their claim gets denied but the hospital does as well. There’s a good chance that the patient doesn’t have the money needed to pay for everything out of pocket, or the hospital has to pay someone else to force the patient to pay up. Either way the hospital gets less than if insurance had simply paid up.
To counteract the risk of denied claims, hospitals have consistently been raising prices to cover those losses. Same idea as when stores raise prices “due to shop lifting”. You’ll hear insurance companies complain about this as a way to distract from their crimes. But in the end its the insurance companies posting record profits while the hospitals are going under.
But in the end its the insurance companies posting record profits while the hospitals are going under.
The perfect hospital has no buildings, employs no doctors and treats no patients
Tons and tons of nurses and other staff got forced out during COVID and never got replaced. Doctor recruitment is controlled by a cartel that keeps the number artificially low. Hospitals and entire care networks are all at risk of being bought out by private equity and getting their copper wiring stripped out at any moment. And yet despite all of this, the healthcare worker segment is the one segment in the job market that is growing - or at least it was last year, we’ll see how it reacts to stripping away hundreds of billions of Medicaid dollars.
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It’s similar in Germany, where we ostensibly have universal healthcare but you definitely get treated better if you can pay more (actually that’s an EU requirement).
It’s not uncommon for ER patients to be in the halls and the main hospital in the area I live in is well known for how bad it is.
And everything related to healthcare is privatized, even the general insurance which everyone has to pay for.
Yeah agreed, I waited nine hours in the ER for like an acute immediate surgery. And then my insurance tried to accuse me of THREATENING like first responders and forcing the doctors to do surgery on me. They were desperate to not have to pay out lol
That’s not just burgerland. Most healthcare systems globally have been leaking staff since the pandemic exposed how little regard governments/oligarchs have for healthcare professionals.
A couple weeks ago I went to the hospital for an unrelenting cough that was starting to tear my back and rib muscles. Got there, had to wait over 3 hours from them to take a couple X-rays. Then told me it’s probably just allergies and then they didn’t even have any basic cough medicine and told me to pick it up at Walmart which I couldn’t because it was past 11pm and they were closed. Billed me $400 dollars and now I’m 99% sure it was a covid cough and not allergies.
fug…
