12 April 2008

With health care like this...

Who needs enemies?

The last time I went to the Belleville General Emergency Room... I spent seven and a half hours sitting on my ass with a sick, fevered child.

Thank goodness, I wasn't having heart trouble...
The night before her fatal heart attack, Amanda Trujillo spent seven hours in a London hospital emergency room, complaining of a strong pain in her left arm as she waited for a doctor who never came.

"At that point, we figured it was not a heart attack, or even serious. Maybe it was just muscle pain," says Trujillo-Murillo.

"If anybody at the hospital thought it was serious, the doctor would have come by now."
(h/t reader rich)

But hey... that's just one inconsequential person, huh?

Dont'cha know Dalton & Georgie have much bigger fish to fry?
Ontario's Liberal government has paid out almost $1 billion to private companies to cover new hospital construction overruns, a coalition of community health organizations said Friday.

"But every single privatized P3 hospital is vastly over budget and every single one is late," she said.
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FROM THE COMMENTS:
"I am a physician. I work at both the patient care level and the hospital budget level. I tell you with no fear of contradiction that the system is unsustainable and will collapse in some way or another within 20 years.

Whether the cause of collapse will be the baby boomers finally hitting the ICUs, or a rash of costly infectious disease imported from outside the country (drug resistant TB, bird flu, etc) I can't say, but the system is going down."

"Count on it."
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