Anti-dumping rules are in place in California. But sometimes it places hospitals in a difficult situation when patients don’t want to leave:
In hospitals, patients have a “nice, warm bed, three meals a day and maybe even a television and people waiting on them. They are literally saying to us, ‘I don’t want to go. If you discharge me, I will call the L.A. Times.’”
The health care crisis affects everyone – patients, doctors and hospitals alike. Patients being left on skid row provide the shock headlines that financially troubled newspapers like the LA Times need.
However, the media needs to present a more balanced view, and that includes covering the financial woes that hospitals and other health care facilities are going through.
Related posts:
- Hospitals are using social media, like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, for advertising to patients
- Transfers and bad hospitals
- Should hospitals use Twitter to follow patients?
- Charity hospitals cherry-picking patients?
- A concierge ER, or, can EMTALA-free, cash-only emergency departments save hospitals?
- Does alternative medicine work? Or does it harm patients?
- Are hospitals purposely causing a PCP shortage?
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The extortion at our hospital goes something like this: Baby A becomes our patient through our unassigned call system. Parents are upset that their physician doesn’t see Baby A because that physician has given up all hospital privileges. We order test A for Baby A(based on some physical finding) (take your pick: renal ultrasound, echo, UGI series) because we won’t see this baby as an outpatient and operate in CYA mode on unassigned patients (we’ve been burned before). Parents pitch temper tantrum about test because their doctor would never do this test and go to management. Hosptial writes off all charges for said test. The moral is that if you pitch a big enough fit – the legally-shy hospital can comp your stay.
Kevin,
It’s interesting how you complain about the lack of balance from those who report on medicine, but you are not a particularly balanced commentator yourself when reporting.
I don’t claim to be an unbiased source of information.
This is a blog, not a newspaper. By definition, entries will be colored with my opinion and biases.
Thanks,
Kevin
I know you don’t purport to be. It’s just ironic that you would criticize other blogs for doing exactly what you do.
You do realize your link is to a blog, right?
Regardless though, it’s still silly to criticize others for not putting out objective info, when you at times even fail to understand the facts before putting your spin on an article.
The great critic is of the opinion that the utterly biased LA Times is a more accurate source of information that this blog.
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