Patient Dumping
The sorry state of healthcare in the US
It’s 6:30am, and I am walking my dog. The winds are howling at 50mph, it’s raining, and the temperature is 36 degrees F. Making his way towards me is an elderly man, leaning on his walker. His thin trousers are no protection from the cold and rain. His shoes are already sopping wet. He stops in the middle of the street, and leans on his walker to rest.
He sees me, and asks, “How far is it to the bus stop?” “Three more blocks,” I answer. I don’t have a car, so I can’t give him a ride to the bus stop, but I can offer to walk with him those three blocks. He declines. He says he will be okay. “I just got out of the hospital,” he tells me. “They told me that I could go down the hill to a bus stop, or I could walk to another stop without a hill. I was afraid that I would fall on the hill, so I decided to try to get to the other stop.”
I live one block from the hospital, and I see patients just released from hospital stays struggling to reach the bus stops almost daily. Some don’t have shoes, and are shuffling along the street in disposable hospital slippers. Some are dressed in a hospital gown and disposable hospital pants. Some are making their way down the street on crutches, limbs bandaged.
Last week, a homeless woman was sitting on my back steps. She was wrapped in a white hospital sheet and wearing a hospital gown. One of her hands was severely burnt. She had a plastic bowl filled with ice water and some packages of bandages. She was wailing.
She told me that she was homeless, and that someone threw a firebomb in the tent that she and her boyfriend were living in. Her hand was burnt as she tried to escape.
She apologized for sitting on my steps. She had just been released from the Emergency Room, and was in too much pain to continue walking. Her boyfriend had run to the nearest store to use a phone, hoping to find someone to come and pick them up and give them shelter.
Patient dumping or homeless dumping is the practice of hospitals and emergency services inappropriately releasing homeless or indigent patients to public hospitals or on the streets instead of placing them with a homeless shelter or retaining them, especially when they may require expensive medical care with minimal government reimbursement from Medicaid or Medicare.[2][3][4][5]
Situations such as these don’t occur in a vacuum. Unemployment, underemployment, poverty, homelessness and the lack of a universal healthcare plan create the strands of the web that entraps more and more people daily.
I have talked to so many ER doctors and nurses who are appalled that patients are released to the streets with a few dollars for bus fare. These healthcare providers work double shifts to accommodate the patients in the overwhelmed hospital Emergency Rooms.
Patients who are uninsured or underinsured find themselves forced to seek treatment in hospital emergency rooms, as they are not accepted as patients in many private offices.
Imagine suffering a severe burn, or a deep gash, or a head injury. Rushed to a hospital in ambulance, you sit for hours in a crowded emergency room, where you eventually receive the minimal treatment necessary to get you out the door. You then have to make your way to a bus stop, where you again sit and wait, according to the bus schedule.
But wait, the hospital staff gave you prescriptions to fill, but a side trip to the pharmacy will add more walking and more waiting, and you are already at the end of your rope — tired and in pain.
And where is the bus going to take you? Is there a bus stop near to where you live? What if your home was a tent that was just firebombed?
Many middle class people may see you shuffling down the street. Some will say, “Get a job.” Some will say, “Stop drinking and taking drugs.”
You wish they understood that you never planned on ending up this way. That the homeless shelters are full, and the addiction treatment facilities are overwhelmed. Most jobs pay an insufficient wage to afford even a studio apartment, and any government benefits that you receive have been cut in each yearly budget.
The system is broken. It is not the fault of the poor, the disabled, the sick.
The President says that the unemployment rate has gone down during his administration. What he doesn’t say is that the vast majority of new employment is from companies like Uber and Instacart. Jobs with pay that sometimes falls below the minimum wage, with no vacation days, sick days, or health insurance provided.
The system is broken. The US spends far more on militarism than on welfare programs.
Since 2001, the US has added $2 for militarism of discretionary spending to every $1 added for communities. That’s twice as much added for militarism than added for public education, housing, childcare, disaster relief, climate protections, and scientific research combined. (https://www.nationalpriorities.org/analysis/2023/warfare-state-how-funding-militarism-compromises-our-welfare/)
The system is broken, and yet the same brazen politicians stand for reelection again and again. And the people, in the hope of voting for “the lesser evil,” act as though they are enslaved hostages in this system of corruption.
Out of fear of the unknown, people continue to vote for “the devil they know.” Or, they choose not to go to the polls at all, because they know that the RNC and the DNC can, and do, rig the elections.
There are alternative candidates. People like Dr. Cornel West, who refers to his campaign as a “moment in a movement.” Because the system is broken, and a sustained movement of “people power” is required to fix it.
And, we have to begin somewhere. We can’t just continue kicking the can down the road if we want a livable environment for our world’s children.
Join the movement. Yes, things will not be easy, but we can offer hope for future generations, and maybe even see improvements in our own lifetimes.
We can make a difference!