Kings County ER Death Not Surprising

Sadly, this is our country –

The Times Union reports:

Emergency rooms, they say, have become all-purpose dumping grounds for the mentally ill, with patients routinely marooned a day or more while health care workers try to find someone to care for them.

A survey of hundreds of U.S. hospitals released last month by the American College of Emergency Physicians found that 79 percent reported that they routinely “boarded” psychiatric patients in their waiting rooms for at least some period of time because of the unavailability of immediate services.

One-third reported that those stays averaged at least eight hours, and 6 percent said they had average waits of more than 24 hours.

The health care crisis in this country is not just about health insurance. The crisis isn’t even just about health care. It’s about an infrastructure in total disarray, from bridges, to city schools, to emergency rooms. There are cracks people fall through, and then there are canyons. The canyons are growing wider as the American Richistan looks after itself. We need to rebuild our country. A few terminations of employees caught on video monitors doing the normal nothing will not do.

Sadly, fewer people think of the United States of America in the first person plural, especially in Richistan. Until more people do, horrors such as the Kings County ER will become more and more common.