Parkland Emergency Room Follow-up
Following our post of the personal experience of a loyal reader who spent a day at Parkland Memorial Hospital’s emergency room, a Dallas restaurateur waited 19 hours in the ER before dying. As reported by the Dallas Morning News:
- The patient was classified as “urgent” after one hour, but “no hospital staffer had so much as checked a pulse” for more than 13 hours.
- Patients admitted to the hospital through the ER last year waited an average of 12 hours and 42 minutes for an inpatient bed.
- More than one in 10 patients leaves the hospital before seeing a doctor.
- According to the CEO Ron Anderson, “each morning….there are about 18, 19, 20 patients down in the ER who have been admitted and have been there all night long because there are no beds upstairs.”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiLziusKW4s
All Night Long
This sounds very much like newspaper accounts of emergency rooms in Canada and in Britain.
It’s socialized medicine under a different name.
Everyone should realize that Parkland’s case load consists of many Medicaid and uninsured patients. Also, both sets of patients get the same care.
This is important because a lot of people, including Barack Obama, think that by enrolling people in Medicaid and calling them “insured” you have increased access to care. In fact, you have done nothing of the sort.