Almost 45 years ago, then-President John F Kennedy, fatally wounded by an assassin's bullet, was taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where he died of his wounds.
One evening last month, former restaurateur Mike Herrera, experiencing severe abdominal pains, walked into Parkland and availed himself of a state-of-the-art, computerized admissions kiosk. Although such a system would appear to be "just what the doctor ordered," Mr Herrera died some 19 hours later, still waiting to be seen.
This is unconscionable. Here at IB, we often point to such shenanigans in the MVNHS©, and in Canada. Parkland spokescritter (and president) Ron Anderson offers this stunning appraisal: "There's nothing you can say except just apologize for this happening."
Are you kidding?!
We expect to see this kind of impersonal, unfeeling health care from a system run by faceless gummint bureaucrats, but not by hospitals in modern American metropoli. What went wrong here?
As it turns out, there's actually an obvious (to IB readers) explanation:
"Mr. Herrera's death follows years of warnings about excessive wait times in the emergency department of Dallas County's charity hospital, which serves the indigent and others without health insurance."
In addition, since there are so few available beds in the hospital proper, patients are kept in the ER for extended periods of time; "boarding," as we've discussed before, is a perennial problem in such facilities.
Although the article fails to explicitly state this, it isn't a stretch to infer that many (perhaps most) of the "indigents" served by Parkland are, in fact, illegal immigrants. As we've previously noted, this group makes up a disproportionate share of "the uninsured," exacerbating the problem of limited facilities.
Our condolences, of course, to Mr Herrera's family. Perhaps this will be a "teaching moment" for the rest of us.
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