But some (many) in this country would rather have a dangerous system than (horrors!) "socialized medicine". And that attitude is morally perverse too.I’m sitting in a hospital room watching my mother snooze as I post this comment. Two weeks ago she entered the hospital for thyroid surgery. Not a small town hospital. A large, a major medical center in a Florida metropolis. But by the Grace of God, she is still alive.
As a nursing instrutor, I know the standards of care and have seen them violated no less than 30 times a day here, every day. I know better than to ever leave her alone here for more than an hour at a time. If I were not a nurse, I have no doubt my mother would not have survived this hospital stay. I really feel for any one in who does not have a nurse in the family to advocate for them when they are at the mercy of this broken system.
American hospitals are some of the most dangerous places on earth if you value your life…. Even the best nurses are stretched beyond their limits by poor staffing ratios. Corporate America cuts nursing care at the bedside to reap profits for their ceo’s and stockholders. Every single one of my mother’s grave complications might have been prevented with good nuring care.
Those of you who think we have the best “health care system in the world”, take it from someone with twenty five years in health care, you are very sadly mistaken, and it could very easily cost you your life.
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Our health care system
There's something really morally perverse about a for-profit hospital. Please read this comment I found to an article on the Common Dreams site:
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My father, a physician in the day before Medicare and Medicaid, a member of the AMA, railed most of his life against "socialized medicine." Before he died in 1997, he had lived long enough that I actually heard him say that we needed a comprehensive, single-payer, governmental health care system. He said that our current system is a scandal. In his day, twenty-five to thirty percent of his practice was pro bono. He was horrified that the whole system had become profit driven. He found that to be totally unacceptable in a country as rich as the U.S. The very idea that an accident of birth was the basis for the rationing of medical services was completely abhorrent to him.
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