In one of the most shocking indictments of our broken health care system I've read, the Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas billed a woman who waited for 19 hours with a broken leg, and gave up without ever being seen by a doctor.
Another man waited just as long and then suffered cardiac arrest and died.
Don't let them tell you that you can just go to an emergency room if you don't have health insurance. Find out the truth below the fold.
Amber Joy Milbrodt had no health insurance. She broke a bone in her leg while playing volleyball. So she went to the emergency room.
After a 3 1/2 hour wait, she was seen for a few minutes by a nurse to determine her place in line. I don't know what you have to have wrong with you to be seen right away — blood gushing out of your carotid artery? Amber was left sitting in the waiting room for hours and hours.
It isn't entirely clear to me from the news story whether this happened before or after the emergency room ordeal, but she got an X-ray at the chiropractic school she goes to that showed that she had a fracture.
She still had not been called more than 15 hours later, so she gave up and went home. ...
"She's not paying for waiting," says Rick Rhine, the hospital's vice president in charge of billing. "She's paying for the assessment she received." ...
Fort Worth's large public hospital, John Peter Smith, shares Parkland's policy of charging for a triage assessment. But other hospitals in Dallas, such as Baylor University Medical Center, don't charge if the person never sees a doctor.
I have to wonder how many patients the nurse is able to triage per hour, at $162 a pop, and how much the nurse is paid per hour. And how many of the patients who are triaged are ultimately seen by doctors and cared for at Parkland.
Folks, this is why we need to reform health care in this country.
Amber doesn't plan to pay. She rested at home, and put her leg in a brace. She says it seems to be healing. I hope she's right.
I found this pretty shocking, but it was hardly the worst story I've heard about our broken health insurance system. I mean, the woman only had a fracture. No "Death by Spreadsheet", this.
The part that really shocked me was this paragraph, third from the end:
A few days before Milbrodt's visit, a 58-year-old man who went to the ER with stomach pains also waited 19 hours — and then suffered cardiac arrest and died.
The. Greatest. Country. In. The. World.
What have we become?