Stuff her in the car

Capitalism is failing so many, the end is coming:

During the arrest of Lisa Edwards, 60, outside Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center, in Tennessee, US, she pleaded with officers for help as they threatened to “stuff her in” the police car

They were apparently sending her to jail!

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I wouldn’t dump too much blame on the cops here. They get the call. There is no other agency. They have to do something. The medical establishment cleared her for release. They are fresh out of tools. Jail at least gets her off the street for 24 hours or whatever their limit is. They certainly aren’t qualified to declare her sick and demand hospitalization.

I know the basis of your post is more economic and not “anti-police” but I read this story last week and the first thing these kinds of stories like the jump to is some kind of shade towards the cops and what their procedures ought to have been.

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The press should have no clue what was going on with her. There is no reason to jump to any conclusions.

At 60, too young for Medicare. If she was on state Medicaid in Rhode Island, would it pay for care in Tennessee? Or did the hospital toss her because Shiny ideology dictates everything be rationed by ability to pay?

Steve

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Did the hospital toss her or did she say she wanted no further care?

The article says she was kept overnight for observation, then tossed out the door. She refused to leave hospital grounds, so the hospital called the police to remove her. She was apparently in distress, but, rather than going back into the hospital, the police followed orders to remove her.

Steve

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okay admittedly I did not read the article.

But why bother?

“Tossed” your word or the reporters?

No one gets to just stay in the hospital. Was she in distress hours before her release? The reporter does not know. The hospital is not supposed to release her private medical history. So what does the reporter know? Zip really.

What was she under observation for? We should not know. The reporter should not know. The police probably do not know.

Why was she so irrational? Again none of us nor the reporter should know.

It is not our business. It is not the reporter’s business.

Was a medical mistake made? Who knows? We certainly do not. Nor should we expect that a medical mistake was made. We do not know. She died. That is not necessarily anyone’s fault.

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I am watching the video. The officer disregarded her condition. The hospital disregarded her condition. She sounds like someone who abuses cigarettes or whatever. She is a mess.

Listen she sounds like she went to a lot of parties. She paid the price. To anyone else out there in need of too many parties…watch the video.

But again we do not know. Nor should we.

Would it be nice if she was guided back to a bed in the hospital? Sure. Would she have died at the exact same moment in time? Close to it.

I guess not all parties are parties. Do I know she was a partier? Kind of obvious looking at the results.

Doctors and police officers do not save everyone. Save yourselves.

The reporter said thrown out. Tossed same word for it.

The hospital does not use the words thrown or tossed. She was discharged. That is not a medical mistake. She was going home or wherever to die. She was dying. There was no saving that mess. Was she offered hospice? We do not know what she was or was not offered. Did she refuse care? We do not know.

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“Tossed” your word or the reporters?

She was discharged against her will. I would say that qualifies as “tossed”.

What was she under observation for?

She went in for abdominal pain. First Doc said constipation. She asked for a second opinion. Then they kept her under observation.

The officer disregarded her condition.

Very much like an officer sitting on a man, who is protesting he can’t breathe. The officer keeps sitting on the man, until he is asphyxiated. Then try to handwave the death away with “he had a history of drug abuse”, or “he was obese”. Blaming the vic has become the Shiny thing to do.

Steve

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She is not necessarily a victim. She was dying. We do not know if she was offered hospice. Nor should we.

The police officer was not nice but her lungs were far from innocent.

She may have had constipation. Why not? She had all sorts of things wrong with her.

Diagnosing all sorts of things may have gone on over the years. Her medical records are not our business. Doctors may have told her for years she was killing herself. We do not know. Doctors do let their patients know such things. They never share that with reporters.

The cop did not do anything to her. The hospital did not do anything to her.

They stopped helping her in that moment. But we do not know if she was offered plenty of help and just wanted that one hospital bed instead.

In the horrific video, you can hear Edwards pleading officers for help as her voice begins to slur. She died from a stroke in the back of the police car.

the reporter said

Yep death is horrific. She has been in terrible shape for a long time. It was all horrific and very scary for a long time. Strokes are silent killers. No one caused that. The slurred speech? Really like that slurring just appeared? The reporter is just taking shots.

If I wrote an engineering report like that reporter writes taking liberties to explain things just however it would be highly unprofessional. But it is so common with reporters.

Note I have a two year engineering degree that I have used but in computer rooms not mechanical engineering.

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I’m sure that if she had a few million in the bank they would have come to a different diagnosis.

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At that rate she would have been coming to very different conclusions about all the things in her life. She would be a very different healthier person.

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This is, before anything else, non-sequitur. In addition, yes, of course if she had a few million she’d have paid her way in but then she’d have been abusing the system and should have been pilloried for doing so just as if you or I had been so self-indulgent. Being able to muscle your way into a hospital simply because you can is not a health care system.

And Leap is right. If she had millions she’d have had a much cleaner act in all probability thus avoiding the whole 30-40 year lead-in to this problem, or at the very least would have died like Rick James or Jim Morrison. Do not blame the cops here. The health care “system” writ large? Perhaps. No system is perfect. But these doctors? This hospital? They all did their jobs. She was self destructive. And she didn’t just pick up the habit over the weekend. I have known people like that. I am willing to bet over the last 30-40 years she ignored, rejected, and even scoffed at every attempt at intervention and redemption. How much do we or should we expect EVERYBODY ELSE to do on behalf of those who are so blind they WILL NOT see? And for how long?

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Isn’t constipation a side effect of opioid use / abuse?

'38Packard

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Yes, it is

(The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog)

As the woman was living in a nursing home, I think it’s a good bet she was on Rhode Island Medicaid. RI Medicaid only pays for emergency care outside of RI. Having been in overnight for observation, her discharge could have been motivated by a disinclination to deal with RI paperwork, or she was stable enough to be deemed “not an emergency”. The parent company of the hospital in question is a not-for-profit, but that does not mean they welcome patients that they can’t get paid for.

Remember the TV series “Saint Elsewhere”? The series dramatized what happens across Shiny-land: people who can’t pay, or can only pay little, get shoved off to other hospitals. I remember a piece on the news about how common the practice is. I recall one bit of that report, about a very pregnant woman, sitting in a car, on a ferry, hoping to get to the hospital she was directed to, when she failed the wallet biopsy at the first hospital she went to. That report covered other cases of people with life-threatening conditions, that had been shoved away by other hospitals, until they finally found one that would take care of them.

In Detroit, the “go-to” place for people shot in the street was Detroit Receiving Hospital. Detroit Receiving was founded as a city owned hospital that treated all comers, regardless of ability to pay, and I noticed the “news” always reporting the injured from the daily quota of shootings were always taken to Detroit Receiving. I no longer hear Detroit Receiving mentioned on the news all the time. Detroit Receiving is now owned by Tenet, a notorious, profit-gubbing, operation.

I will say again, I am a little disturbed by the tendency of some on this board, to “blame the victim” for possibly making some poor decisions, over decades, as if that excused rough and dismissive treatment.

Here are the RI Medicaid regs.

https://eohhs.ri.gov/ProvidersPartners/ProviderManualsGuidelines/MedicaidProviderManual/Hospital/HospitalCoveragePolicy.aspx

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Whatever her circumstances, she was still human and deserved to be treated with some dignity.

The nonprofit label comes from the fact that they are exempt from federal and local taxes in exchange for providing a certain amount of “community benefit.”

Nonprofit hospitals have their origins in the charity hospitals of the early 1900s, but over the last century they’ve gradually shifted from that model. Now their explosive growth has many questioning how we define “nonprofit” and what sort of responsibility these hospitals have to the communities that provide this financial dispensation.

It’s time to rethink the concept of nonprofit hospitals. Tax exemption is a gift provided by the community and should be treated as such. Hospitals’ community benefit should be defined more explicitly in terms of tangible medical benefits for local residents.

It actually isn’t much of a surprise that nonprofit hospitals are often more profitable than for-profit hospitals. If a private business doesn’t have to pay taxes, its expenses will be lower. Additionally, because nonprofit hospitals are defined as charitable institutions, they can benefit from tax-free contributions from donors and tax-free bonds for capital projects, things that for-profit hospitals cannot take advantage of.

The real question surrounding nonprofit hospitals is whether the benefits to the community equal what taxpayers donate to these hospitals in the form of tax-exempt status.

And the answer to the above question is largely NO.

Charitable care became optional and it was left up to the hospitals to decide how to pay back that debt. Hospitals could even declare that accepting Medicaid insurance was a community benefit and write off the difference between the Medicaid payment and their own calculations of cost.

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And that opens the door for my repeated observation - our medical system doesn’t really deal with mental illness very well. We’ve got all sorts of ways to treat the body, but when the mind is the main issue - making the body problems the symptom and not the core problem - we fail pretty consistently.

I’m not sure other countries do any better, but it would be hard to do much worse.

–Peter