Woman died after being denied ambulance because she was 'still talking' I just thought I would post this seeing how everyone says other developed countries health care is better than the States. Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/...still-talking/?intcmp=obnetwork#ixzz1sWJNzmYl
Well, I'll just trot out the WHO meme: the US is 37th!!! in healthcare rankings. Of course, what those who trot out the survey don't tell you is that the US falls behind in 3 of the key measures of the report: how medical care is paid for. If strangers pay for your care, the medical system gets a high rank. If you are responsible, to any extent, for paying for services you want/need, then it's a "poor" quality system. On the 4th measure, performance, the US is #1. So, in answer to your OP, you can either have "free" healthcare in which the government extorts money from strangers and uses it to pay for substandard service, or you can have performance where providers are serving you, the consumer, or not getting your business.
Somebody (the triage nurse) made a bad call. That said, the fact that you can speak intelligibly indicates that you can indeed breathe. The Swedish system is obviously only 99% better than the US lashup.
that sums it up well...when I took my first aid course one of the first things we learned was to check ABC-Airway, Breathing, and Circulation, obviously if someone is talking they are breathing...the Triage nurse either made a bad call or we're not getting the entire story...mistakes happen everywhere, no country regardless it's level of medical sophistication is immune to errors or miscommunication...
America. Ignored By 911, Woman Dies In Hospital A woman who lay bleeding on the emergency room floor of a troubled inner-city hospital died after 911 dispatchers refused to contact paramedics or an ambulance to take her to another facility, newly released tapes of the emergency calls reveal. Edith Isabel Rodriguez, 43, died of a perforated bowel on May 9 at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital. Her death was ruled accidental by the Los Angeles County coroner's office. http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-204_162-2923545.html
Yes, i was going to ask the same. If someone dies in the usa. Is that a judgement to the entire american health service or just a unfourante event.
I was primarily replying to you actually and I think the attitude of focusing exclusively on "our healthcare is better than yours" is pretty nationalistic, especially when it's done on the basis of over-simplified "arguments" and extreme cases.
I agree here's a paraphrasing: In Sweden, healthcare is so good that a single case of arguably understandable malpractice makes national news. Of course, that's not really the entire truth either, news like to blow up personal stories and I'm sure any country has problems like this (or the inverse one, that the person just stays at home not expecting an ambulance).
I would always try to compare a country of less than 10,000,000 people with one with over 350,000,000 in every imaginable category. In my opinion, the only thing such a comparison would do is demnstrate the logic of limiting the U.S. Federal government and putting more power in the hands of the states and even cities.
I would never entertain such a parochial argument since the resources are simply scaled up pro rata. In fact, there should be economies of scale in such a move. If Britain, for example can provide a universal health service on 5% admin cost, why is it three times that in the USA to administer a "system" which does not reach 40M citizens?
And Britain is a goal that only a Democrat would pursue. Meeting time limits on serivce in emergency rooms by locking the doors and requiring sick and injured to wiat in the parking lot or in ambualnces until they've caught up is a goal that only a liberal would like. The economy of scale yields to the corruption of scale. I would never entertain such a illogical argument as resources are simply scaled up. It shows an amazing faith and an even more incredible gullibilty. You seem to have faith in government and in the numbers they claim.
Yet history shows that the opposite is true. As programs and policies are created at higher and higher levels of government to encompass more people, the total program costs increase - at a rate faster than the increase of the number of people covered.
You seem very informed with british health care. In what part of the uk were brits 'locked outside of ER rooms and in parking lots'
Why do you believe the health care industry lends itself well to economies of scale? The USA has about 40 times the landmass of the UK and over 5 times the population. The population density in the UK is about 8 times that of the US. Hospitals and other healthcare infrastructure have big fixed costs. You may be correct regarding economies of scale, but I don't think it's quite the "no-brainer" that you've made it out to be.
This is what an immigrant that had lived in Sweden for many years had to say about the healthcare system: "I was left with untreated, chronic encephaltis in Sweden's medical dictatorship. Do you have any idea how fu*cked up it is to be left with untreated encephalitis and what hell this inflicts upon your body?!! I probably would NOT even be alive if I had not fled the country for help - after I was repeatedly denied help in Sweden's garbage Hell Care system. Medical Dicatorship! While seeking treatments - among numerous arrogant, ignorant things - I was told that my symptoms were a manifestation of being stressed because I was an immigrant in Sweden. I was twice told that I would feel better if I had a baby. One doctor said western women worry too much about education and financial security and that I should think about how women in Africa have babies regardless of these things. It was written in my journal that my symptoms were manifested because I didn't speak good Swedish - this written by a doctor whom I had only ever spoken English with. And the arrogant, bigoted abusive list goes on... Behavior that is non-Swedish is absolutely considered deviant behavior, and very often, the punishment is torture, kidnapping of children, and death conveniently called health care and social welfare. Someone wrote that Sweden's health care and social welfare agencies reminded them of Orwell's Ministry of Love... The unchecked, rampant abuses in this system are horrific. How can anyone respect the Nobel Prize in Medicine when it comes from a society that is the very opposite of healing?! . Sweden most certainly is not what its government would have the world believe."