best health care system in world by

The Best Health Care System In The World

by digby

Tale of last 90 minutes of woman's life

In the emergency room at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital,

Edith Isabel Rodriguez was seen as a complainer.

"Thanks a lot, officers," an emergency room nurse told Los Angeles

County police who brought in Rodriguez early May 9 after finding

her in front of the Willowbrook hospital yelling for help. "This is

her third time here."

The 43-year-old mother of three had been released from the

emergency room hours earlier, her third visit in three days for

abdominal pain. She'd been given prescription medication and a

doctor's appointment.

Turning to Rodriguez, the nurse said, "You have already been seen,

and there is nothing we can do," according to a report by the

county office of public safety, which provides security at the

hospital.

Parked in the emergency room lobby in a wheelchair after police

left, she fell to the floor. She lay on the linoleum, writhing in

pain, for 45 minutes, as staffers worked at their desks and

numerous patients looked on.

Aside from one patient who briefly checked on her condition, no one

helped her. A janitor cleaned the floor around her as if she were a

piece of furniture. A closed-circuit camera captured everyone's

apparent indifference.

Arriving to find Rodriguez on the floor, her boyfriend

unsuccessfully tried to enlist help from the medical staff and

county police -- even a 911 dispatcher, who balked at sending

rescuers to a hospital.

Alerted to the "disturbance" in the lobby, police stepped in -- by

running Rodriguez's record. They found an outstanding warrant and

prepared to take her to jail. She died before she could be put into

a squad car.

[...]

The story of Rodriguez's demise began at 12:34 a.m. when two county

police officers received a radio call of a "female down" and

yelling for help near the front entrance of King-Harbor, according

to the police report.

When they approached Rodriguez to ask what was wrong, she responded

in a "loud and belligerent voice that her stomach was hurting," the

report states. She said she had 10 gallstones and that one of them

had burst.

A staff member summoned by the police arrived with a wheelchair and

rolled her into the emergency room. Among her belongings, one

officer found her latest discharge slip from the hospital, which

instructed her to "return to ER if nausea, vomit, more pain or any

worse."

When the officers talked to the emergency room nurse, she "did not

show any concern" for Rodriguez, the police report said. The report

identifies the nurse as Linda Witland, but county officials

confirmed that her name is Linda Ruttlen, who began working for the

county in July 1992.

Ruttlen could not be reached for comment.

During that initial discussion with Ruttlen, Rodriguez slipped off

her wheelchair onto the floor and curled into a fetal position,

screaming in pain, the report said.

Ruttlen told her to "get off the floor and onto a chair," the

police report said. Two officers and a different nurse helped her

back to the wheelchair and brought her close to the reception

counter, where a staff member asked her to remain seated.

The officers left and Rodriguez again pitched forward onto the

floor, apparently unable to get up, according to people who saw the

videotape and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Because the tape does not have sound, it is not possible to

determine whether Rodriguez was screaming or what she was saying,

the viewers said. Because of the camera's angle, in most scenes,

she is but a grainy blob, sometimes obstructed, moving around on

the floor.

When Rodriguez's boyfriend, Jose Prado, returned to the hospital

after an errand and saw her on the floor, he alerted nurses and

then called 911.

According to Sheriff's Capt. Ray Peavy, the dispatcher said, "Look,

sir, it indicates you're already in a hospital setting. We cannot

send emergency equipment out there to take you to a hospital you're

already at."

Prado then knocked on the door of the county police, near the

emergency room, and said, "My girlfriend needs help and they don't

want to help her," according to the police report. A sergeant told

him to consult the medical staff, the report said. Minutes later,

Prado came back to the sergeant and said, "They don't want to help

her." Again, he was told to see the medical staff.

Within minutes, police began taking Rodriguez into custody. When

they told Prado that there was a warrant for Rodriguez's arrest, he

asked if she would get medical care wherever she was taken. They

assured him that she would. He then kissed her and left, the police

report said.

She was wheeled to the patrol vehicle and the door was opened so

that she could get into the back. When officers asked her to get

up, she did not respond. An officer tried to revive her with an

ammonia inhalant, then checked for a pulse and found none. She died

in the emergency room after resuscitation efforts failed.

According to preliminary coroner's findings, the cause was a

perforated large bowel, which caused an infection. Experts say the

condition can bring about death fairly suddenly.

You might think that it was just this one hospital or an isolated

incident, but you'd be wrong:

A paraplegic man wearing a soiled hospital gown and a broken

colostomy bag was found crawling in a gutter in skid row in Los

Angeles on Thursday after allegedly being dumped in the street by a

Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center van, police said.

The incident, witnessed by more than two dozen people, was

described by police as a particularly outrageous case of "homeless

dumping" that has plagued the downtown area.

"I can't think of anything colder than that," said LAPD Det. Russ

Long, who called the case the most egregious of its kind that he

has seen in his career. "There was no mission around, no services.

It's the worst area of skid row."

You know the old saying, "as California goes, so goes the nation?"

The health care system in Los Angeles is broken and it's an

exciting preview of what's coming to your town next if something

isn't done. The population of uninsured is huge here and growing

and the hospital system is so strapped that only the richest

facilities offer halfway decent care. Get ready America.

If people can live with this, which many can I'm sure, then no

problem. Just let paraplegics die in the gutter and women with

perforated bowels writhe around in pain on the floor of emergency

rooms because people are so hardened that they really don't give a

damn anymore. I guess we can all just cross our fingers and hope we

get rich and stay very, very lucky so it doesn't happen to us.

After all, if worse comes to worse we could win the lottery. (Oh

never mind, the Governor wants to "lease" the lottery to private

interests so that he can cover his ass long enough to get out of

office before the entire state budget blows up.)

The good news is that the one thing we can always rely upon is the

warm compassionate conservatives who are very, very religious

people and hold some things sacred above all others: the rich shalt

never, ever have to pay their fair share of taxes and fetuses and

blastocysts shall be protected above living human beings. This is

what's known as "the culture 'o life." I do believe it was Jesus

who said, if you aren't entrepreneurial enough to go online and

comparison shop for the best emergency room you deserve to be

dumped in a gutter to die. Or maybe it was Newt Gingrich. It's so

hard to tell the difference.

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