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Look, every person with a modicum of intelligence understands that ERs are a triage - they stabilize the patient, decide what is wrong with the patient then either 'fix' the patient if it is there capability to do so (stitches, rudimentary X-rays) or admit the patient to the hospital for things like surgery and oh, I don't know -- dialysis.
That you refuse to grasp that is not pommymommys fault.
As to the problem of illegals using/abusing the ER system has been substantiated already in this thread.
If you want to hang on semantics - thats your deal. The rest of us have been able to follow the thread and understand the ramifications of illegals draining our already overstrained hospitals.
Except you are working from false assumptions. Pommymoomy has not proved that the people she saw in the ER were immigrants or illegals. It's possible she was basing her impression on the ethnicity of the patients. But wait. Doesn't El Paso have a high Hispanic population? Does this mean that almost every patient that walks in the ER could be an illegal just based on how they look? I suppose that must be the logic behind Pommymoomy's post.
As far as "ramifications of illegals draining our overstrained hospitals", I can assure you that where I live, most of the people are white American citizens. And I can assure that the people draining our overstrained hospital are uninsured white American citizens who show up in the ER and don't pay their bills.
Look, every person with a modicum of intelligence understands that ERs are a triage - they stabilize the patient, decide what is wrong with the patient then either 'fix' the patient if it is there capability to do so (stitches, rudimentary X-rays) or admit the patient to the hospital for things like surgery and oh, I don't know -- dialysis.
That you refuse to grasp that is not pommymommys fault.
As to the problem of illegals using/abusing the ER system has been substantiated already in this thread.
If you want to hang on semantics - thats your deal. The rest of us have been able to follow the thread and understand the ramifications of illegals draining our already overstrained hospitals.
Thank you. I have personal knowledge of renal failure patients who are "frequent fliers" to the local ERs. They cannot receive dialysis on an outpatient basis and seem to have no concern about the fact that U.S. taxpayers are footing the bill. How I know that they are not legal residents is something I am not going to share on a public forum.
Last edited by pommysmommy; 09-25-2009 at 08:13 PM..
Reason: typo
Location: Jonquil City (aka Smyrna) Georgia- by Atlanta
16,259 posts, read 24,763,471 times
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What the article did not mention - and what we who live here know- is that many of these folks live in places like Gwinett and Cobb counties and they use Grady because those counties do not have "free" hospitals. The real reason they are closing it is not because the people using it are illegal but because they do not live in Fulton or DeKalb county which pays for Grady.
What the article did not mention - and what we who live here know- is that many of these folks live in places like Gwinett and Cobb counties and they use Grady because those counties do not have "free" hospitals. The real reason they are closing it is not because the people using it are illegal but because they do not live in Fulton or DeKalb county which pays for Grady.
Interesting. How is it that Grady decided to offer dialysis services to illegal immigrants in the first place? Was it a state mandate?
Location: Jonquil City (aka Smyrna) Georgia- by Atlanta
16,259 posts, read 24,763,471 times
Reputation: 3587
Quote:
Originally Posted by pommysmommy
Interesting. How is it that Grady decided to offer dialysis services to illegal immigrants in the first place? Was it a state mandate?
I don't know. They have a variety of clinics for various things but this one seems to attract alot of folks that don't live in Fulton or DeKalb. Many, if not most, of the illegals here actually reside in the outer counties because they can get jobs there.
While I agree that it's not at all the point of the thread, as a board certified emergency physician I need to clear up some facts. Overcrowding is a huge problem in US EDs (as well as the attached hospitals) throughout the country. During the winter months especially, some metropolitan EDs and even some larger community EDs can have 50% or more of their rooms/beds/chairs occupied by people that have already been admitted to the hospital on any given day at any given hour because the hospital is full (either physically or functionally due to staffing issues) - sometimes these people have been 'admitted' for days (or at least easily more than 24 hours) before actually being physically moved to an 'inpatient' bed/room. Sometimes ICU patients are held for many hours (the maximum I've personally seen is almost an entire shift (8-12 hours) in Emergency Departments before an ICU bed opens up. On more than one occasion I've even seen patients on ventilators in the ED for hours waiting for their ICU bed (even intubated a few of them myself). While these patients are being boarded (that's the term for the phenomenon) they are not being ignored - they are actually receiving ongoing medical care - including dialysis if necessary. I've personally seen dialysis take place in an ED bed/room more than once - I can't say that it's an everyday occurence or a desireable situation, but it can and does happen. As someone else stated, usually these dialysis patients are technically admitted to the hospital and eventually do make their way to the hospital proper - I've never seen an ED patient receive dialysis and then be discharged from the ED by the ED physician (and I certainly never did this myself).
(I've also never seen general anesthesia administered in the ED - therefore anything requiring it wouldn't happen there either, but you might be surprised by what can be accomplished with deep sedation in an ED setting. (Credentialing/hospital privileges and liability insurance issues would not allow for these procedures in that setting - short of some large scale natural disaster, acts of war, or other extenuating circumstances I suppose - but in those cases mass-casualty triage kicks in and your not going to waste resources on a lot of those types of things. I digress)
I'm not trying to escalate any ongoing arguments here, just stating some facts from my personal experience.
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