Cobb

They could just fire the staff and replace them.

Tavis Smiley has segment on this.

Sad to hear. I remember that they were having problems there and trying to come up with solutions before we left in '99. Too bad the Sups still can't get their collective head out of their ass. If there's any neighborhood in LA that needs a hospital with a competent ER, that's it.

Do we understand that our process of providing medical care is insane?

"Best medical care in the world"

is a lie....

What's insane is that emergency rooms are being used as walk-in clinics, so that people with true emergencies frequently can't get prompt care. I don't think it's possible for the same ER to focus successfully on treating trauma patients AND deal with the 2-year-old with an earache.

When Tennessee switched to TennCare several years ago, that was supposed to help because people on TennCare were supposed to find a primary care physician. After a stated period of time, the ERs were supposed to tell people on TennCare who weren't having a real emergency that they weren't going to treat them and they needed to call their doctors. But for some reason the ERs are still just as full as ever, and it's the same non-emergencies. I don't know why there can't be a walk-in clinic next door to each ER. The triage people could direct the appropriate patients to those clinics and let the ER personnel focus on dealing with traumas and emergencies.

Laura, the ER's are being used as walk in care because that's how the system is set up. You can't get in except through the ER. My mom had to wait 23 hours to be seen because when her gall bladder went bad, and then waited 6 months for the surgery to remove it. (The job she held at the time didn't provide health coverage.) I agree with you in that there should be some sort of triage scheme where patients are directed to otehr departments, but of course money is always an issue.

I only partially agree w/Cobb on the issue of incompetence. While it's true that any socialized health care scheme is incompetent at it's core, this system was not only victimized by it's own ineptitude, it was also victimized by the crush of illegal immigrants seeking care. Let's face it, LA County is not a bottomless pit of revenue, and illegals are net users of gov't services, not contributors.

Robert, I know the system is set up that way in some places but it really isn't set up that way here. People are using it that way anyway. If you lived in Tennessee, and your mom works, she might not qualify for TennCare, it's true. But she shouldn't have to wait hours to be seen in the ER (which she would) because the people who do qualify for TennCare shouldn't be using it as a walk-in. I guess it's just too-oo much trouble to call the primary care doc and get an appointment.

As to the illegals - there I think we as a country are just schizophrenic. We obviously want these people here or we would make a serious effort to stop them at the border and deport them. So why not go on and regularize them so they can start paying taxes (apart from the ones they already do) and so forth? Why pretend they aren't here? Is it really because businesses demand workers who don't have to be paid minimum wage or social security and who won't call OSHA? I really, really believe in the free market system but this whole situation makes me wonder if Marx wasn't right, that capitalism depends on an underclass.

By what objective measure does socialized medicine (which we don't quite have) fail?

Lester, it fails in that it cannot provide timely care to those in need.

Case in point, a man who couldn't get to an NHS dentist in Britain pulled his own teeth in desperation.

"His home town of Scarbrough, North Yorks, is so hard-hit with the lack of NHS dentists that queues stretched hundreds of yards earlier this year when one finally opened."

Why should anyone have to queue up just to see the damn dentist?

Or shall we follow Canada's example?

"Comparing Canada with other industrialized countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that provide universal access to health care, a study released by The Fraser Institute in May revealed that Canada spends more on its system than other nations while ranking among the lowest in several key indicators, such as access to physicians, quality of medical equipment, and key health outcomes."

Id say that the examples cited are very objective examples of why we don't want this here in the States. I used to work with a lot of Canucks in my days at Microsoft. They go through a nightmare of red tape to terminate their tax payments to the NHS when they pay for benefits here in the US. If the NHS is so great why would they do that?

Simple, because they get better care here.

I may have complained about my mom being in the ER for 23 hours, but that sure as hell beats 17.7 weeks.