THIS IS WHERE AMERICA DOES HAVE SOCIALIZED MEDICINE

Look forward to similar immovable indifference towards everybody if the Dems get their way

Despite a court order to improve medical care for inmates, San Quentin State Prison's health facilities and treatment practices are so harrowingly bad that many sick prisoners should not be taken there at all, independent examiners have concluded. The court-appointed experts inspected the medical records of 10 inmates who died over the last few years in California's oldest and best known prison and concluded that in each case, the treatment "showed serious problems" and "most deaths were preventable."

Doctors and nurses misdiagnosed illnesses, gave patients the wrong medications, neglected them for months and even years or delayed sending them to emergency rooms until they were fatally ill, the experts discovered.

The examiners watched a dentist examine inmate after inmate while wearing the same pair of gloves. Records were in such disarray that doctors reported that they could not find medical files for at least 30% of the inmates they examined.

Based on visits to the prison earlier this year, the experts' April 8 report documented filthy clinics and patient housing. Dental examinations are done in a place without light or water; inmates are initially evaluated in a room without a sink for washing hands; nurses until recently used a broom closet as an examination room; and wheelchair-bound patients cannot roll into the hospital cells on their own because the doors are too narrow.

"We found a facility so old, antiquated, dirty, poorly staffed, poorly maintained, with inadequate medical space and equipment and overcrowded that it is our opinion that it is dangerous to house people there with certain medical conditions and also dangerous to use this facility as an intake facility," the experts wrote.

The examiners found less dreadful but nonetheless extensive shortcomings with the medical care at Salinas Valley State Prison and the California State Prison at Sacramento, in Folsom. Although they found improvements, the visits uncovered some of the same management problems that plague San Quentin, including a lack of basic medical equipment, dirty facilities and a culture of indifference among some senior medical staff.......

Romero said the reports make her question whether the prison system is capable of reforming itself. She noted that while $1 billion of the $7-billion annual prison budget is spent on healthcare, the reports suggest that much of this money is squandered. "What these reports reflect is there has been a culture of negligence by the bureaucracies across the various administrations in terms of addressing the most basic healthcare needs of inmates," Romero said....

The experts also noted that the prison only emerged within the last decade from a previous federal order to improve medical care. "The system of organizational structure within the [California Department of Corrections] that permitted this facility to deteriorate over the past 10 years to the state described in this report must be addressed as well," they wrote. "These problems have not occurred overnight."

Among the problems at San Quentin identified by the examiners:

* Three patients who later died had been seen by the same doctor, who the experts said failed to properly treat patients with clear signs of extreme illness and did not refer them for emergency care "until their conditions had deteriorated to the point where their deaths were inevitable." The doctor, who was not named in the report, was placed on administrative leave after the third death.

* One patient identified as having "extremely high blood pressure" was "basically neglected for over a year and a half" until he died.

* Another patient who died from renal failure was not correctly diagnosed for "an extended period" and then was not given dialysis. He was, however, given medicines that were not safe for him.

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AUSTRALIANS GO FAR TO AVOID WAITING LISTS

Pity if you are too sick to travel

Patients needing elective surgery are turning to country hospitals, where waiting times are shorter than in metropolitan hospitals. New State Government figures show patients are waiting up to a year or more for elective surgery at Melbourne hospitals. But smaller waiting lists at country hospitals allow patients to have most types of elective surgery within 10 weeks.

Waiting lists for every Victorian hospital were released yesterday on a government internet site. The Your Hospitals list is designed as a guide for patients, allowing them to choose which hospital offers the shortest wait for elective surgery. But it has revealed some embarrassing figures for some major Melbourne hospitals. Patients at Frankston and Monash hospitals wait 55 weeks for surgery on feet and toes. Hip replacements take up to 44 weeks at Williamstown Hospital.

But at hospitals in Shepparton, Traralgon and Ballarat, the wait for the same surgery is no longer than 20 weeks. Knee reconstruction patient Ross Fernando, 23, bypassed lengthy waiting lists at Maroondah and Box Hill hospitals. He chose instead to see a surgeon at the West Gippsland Healthcare Group in Warragul, 90km from his Montrose home, and waited just two months before surgery. "It was an hour-and-a-half drive, but it saved me a 10-month wait," Mr Fernando said.

Health Minister Bronwyn Pike said waiting lists at some hospitals were not up to scratch. "Some of these figures are still too high and other governments may have baulked at providing them to the community, but giving choice and information to make the system better over-rides any other concerns," she said.

However, Opposition health spokesman David Davis said the Government's statistics did not reveal the full story about hospital waiting times. He said some elective patients waited years. Marina De Vizcay, 62, from Wantirna, said she had been waiting nearly seven years for breast reduction surgery to ease neck and back pain. And Maroondah Hospital staff had told her she could be waiting a further two years, she said. "I feel like I have been forgotten," she said.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL hospitals and health insurance schemes should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the very poor and minimal regulation.

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