The California patient-dumping scandals highlight the fact that America has no health care system. Rather, care is provided–or not–by a bunch of disconnected providers who occasionally throw up their arms in despair and throw patients into the streets. In some cases, literally.
The fact that this happened even once should make every member of the health care industry–and that includes policymakers, payers (and, yes, health care writers)–ashamed that this could happen in our country. The fact that it has happened repeatedly is a cry for leadership to create a real system in which patients are not abandoned.
Hospitals love to brag about saving people’s lives. But those brags ring hollow when patients are being mistreated because hospital administrators do not know what to do with them.