Picture This.....

You are a paraplegic man, in hospital for some undisclosed reason. You have no family, no friends, nowhere to go. You have no insurance, no way of paying for the treatment of whatever ails you. How much worse can it get?
Plenty, if you happen to be in Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center.

More than 2 dozen witnesses saw a white van with "Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center" written on the side dump a 41 year old paraplegic man into the gutter on Skid Row before driving away on Thursday. Apparently, the female driver of the van ignored the shouts of witnesses and applied make-up and perfume before driving away leaving the man, in a soiled hospital gown and with a broken colostomy bag, to crawl from the gutter dragging a bag full of belongings in his clenched teeth. The man was later rescued from the gutter and taken to LA County USC Medical Center.

A spokesman said the hospital's preliminary investigation showed that a hospital ambulance had tried to take the man early in the morning to the Midnight Mission, which he had listed on hospital forms as his home address. But also said the ambulance was turned away because there was no room at the mission.
The man was returned to the hospital's emergency room, the spokesman said; after a shift change, new personnel tried to take the man to his listed address in the van. The spokesman said he did not know whether those personnel knew of the previous attempt or that the address was a mission. But said that on the second attempt, when the van neared the mission, the man "asked the driver to open the door and let him out…. He assured the driver that his wheelchair was at his home and that he could propel himself to his home from (there)."

The LAPD have been working diligently over the past couple of years to reduce the amount of homeless people on Skid Row by arresting them or by putting them on buses and sending them to places like Santa Clarita where they don't really have any homeless people. The hospitals' practice of dumping homeless people on Skid Row is not helping. As quick as the cops can get rid of them, the hospitals are putting them back. Last year, Kaiser Permanente hospitals were busted for doing this same thing. It's obviously a common occurence.

The hospitals explanation is at odds with that of the LAPD's account of what happened. LAPD Officer Eric de la Cruz said he asked the man if he had requested to be dropped off at the location."He said he had nowhere else to go, and the hospital staff told him he could no longer stay there," De la Cruz said. De La Cruz's commander, Capt. Andrew Smith of the LAPD's Central Division, said the man appeared to be "confused and disoriented" when police encountered him.

Jim Lott, executive vice president of the Hospital Assn. of Southern California, acknowledged Friday that "this one slipped through the cracks."Lott said Hollywood Presbyterian had "very strong protocols" in place guiding the release of homeless patients but it was evident they had not been not followed in this case.
"We aren't making any excuses for it," he said.

So, okay. Health Care in the States is a business. BIG business. (Look out Britain - this is the future!) I can almost understand why they dumped him. No one to pay the bill, what's in it for them? I'm not condoning it, I'm just saying I understand the decision. But at the very least, the bare minimum they could have done for the lad before chucking him out of the van was to give him a clean robe and a new colostomy bag. For fucks sake! How much would that have cost? Now that I think about it, no fuckin colostomy bag is better than a broken one.

Bastards!

Things like this make yesterday's adventure with Cunting Sears a real fucking treat.