Injured man dies after rejection by 14 hospitals

[raccoon]

Source: Associated Press

By MARI YAMAGUCHI, Associated Press Writer – 4 mins ago

TOKYO – A 69-year-old Japanese man injured in a traffic accident died after paramedics spent more than an hour negotiating with 14 hospitals before finding one to admit him, a fire department official said Wednesday.

The man, whose bicycle collided with a motorcycle in the western city of Itami, waited at the scene in an ambulance because the hospitals said they could not accept him, citing a lack of specialists, equipment, beds and staff, according to Mitsuhisa Ikemoto.

It was the latest in a string of recent cases in Japan in which patients were denied treatment, underscoring the country's health care woes that include a shortage of doctors.



Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090204/ap_on_re_as/as_japan_medical_care_denied

---

Looks like the US isn't the only industrialized nation where health care has its--ahem, challenges.

Is there a JMA that limits the number of doctors there? :shrug:

[marshall]

1. The wonders of a universal health care system

http://www.ajstokyo.org/ajs_j/teruo_hirose-j.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Japan

Hopefully we can do a better job here.

[spotbird]

28. You think this doesn't happen here? nt

[WriteDown]

2. Yep...

Proving once again that universal does not equal perfect.

[denverbill]

4. I don't expect perfection. Way better and cheaper would be sufficient.

You know, a health care system where people didn't lose their homes and life savings because they get sick after getting laid off? Where old people don't have to choose between medicine and food? One that costs far less than ours and cares for everybody? Like they have in the rest of the civilized world.

[WriteDown]

5. I'd also like one....

Where if I was in a bike accident, I did not die from lack of treatment. That's just me though.

My only point is that we have to tread VERY carefully when trying to establish universal care.

[denverbill]

8. Maybe if they spent 50% more on their health system like we do, they wouldn't have been too busy.

Personally, I think when you say "tread VERY carefully" you mean "don't do anything to mess with privatized health care."

Just mho.

[WriteDown]

9. No...

but there are honest concerns. Will you be able to sue your doctor? Will wait times be controlled? Will we have necessary mandatory check-ups?

[denverbill]

11. Honest concerns are a good thing.

And you raise good questions.

And if you want my answers to your questions, I'd say yes, you should be able to sue your doctor, yes, wait time control needs to be a permanent feature, and possibly for the mandatory checkups, since I wouldn't jail anyone who didn't get a checkup, but since regular checkups save lives and save money.

A better question might be how are we going to determine the limits to treatment? In the current system, money limits treatment. If your insurance won't cover a heart/lung transplant, you aren't going to get one unless some charity happens to help you. Do we spend $200,000 giving a 80 year old alcoholic smoker a heart-lung transplant when it only adds months to his life expectancy? Are we willing to spend 1% more on health care to guarantee heart-lung transplants to everyone? How long do we keep a patient on life-support if they are determined to be brain dead?

There are lots of hard choices that will need to be made, but I'd rather have those decisions being made health professionals who have the best interests of patients as their goal, not by insurance companies and drug companies who only care about their bottom line.

[WriteDown]

17. You have some good points....

I would disagree with one. Not sure I'd be comfortable with "health professionals" deciding whether patients could sue. Seems like a huge conflict of interest.

Also, many doctors care extremely little about their patients. I went to UNC and was premed until my senior year(I still have an intense hatred of organic chem). If you asked 85% of the people enrolled in premed why they wanted to practice medicine, their answer would be, "My parents said they'd pay for med school and I want to make money."

[denverbill]

20. I didn't mean to indicate that health professionals would decide about lawsuits.

There are also many many people who go into medicine because they care about helping people, as evidenced by the numbers of them who travel abroad giving free care and work in free clinics here.

The fact that so many people go into it for the money is proof that economic self-interest is not the best way to run health-care. Doctors that see their patients as sources of income will never give as good of care as those who truly want to make and keep them healthy. If you ask a heart surgeon who is profit-motivated whether surgery is better than drug therapy, do you really want him to offer his opinion based on how much money he would make $10,000 cutting you open versus nothing for putting you on drugs? Even the most ethical person in the world would probably have to admit they MIGHT be influenced by money in that situation, especially if the outcomes of the two treatments were similar.

So take the profit motive out. Let's make medical school free for anyone willing to practice in the US at standard rates of reimbursement, pay malpractice insurance costs for those doctors, and have them treat people based on the best treatment for the person, rather than the most profitable for the doctor, or the most heavily advertised drug.

[Oak2004]

21. Those are good concerns

The fact is, there are forces who, given half an opportunity, would deliberately underfund universal healthcare and sabotage it to their own ends. Unless we remain diligent, and recognize that getting universal healthcare is only the first step in a lifetime's worth of activism, we will get a system designed to screw people over for the benefit of a few.

[Delphinus]

29. I think you're right:

HR 676 the way it is written is not the end all/be all. It will continue to take some fine tuning. And I totally agree with your assessment that if we don't remain vigilant, most of us will get screwed.

[knixphan]

12. amen.

[superconnected]

25. I suppose no health care for most of the people is a better alternative than less than perfect

universal health care?

[melm00se]

3. this line

underscoring the country's health care woes that include a shortage of doctors.

will become very common here if we create universal health care without addressing the underlying fact that we are closet to the edge with doctors and nurses NOW which will become a significantly larger problem with 44 million additional potential patients are brought into the system

[harun]

7. I don't think that will happen because of universal care. If doctors

don't have to waste half their time fighting with Insurance companies, they will be able to handle more people.

Also we need to make Medical School more attainable for middle and lower class people.

[nyy1998]

13. I couldn't agree more

However, i think Japan is facing a shortage of doctors mostly as a byproduct of their declining population which is order and not having as many kids, so there's going to be a large brain vacuum in Japan for a few years until their populations starts reproducing. This is an extremely serious problem for Japan.

[harun]

14. I wonder if the lack of immigrants effects it as well. We try to pull in

doctors from about every country on Earth to the U.S.

[superconnected]

26. Meanwhile the 44million get no health care and what, die?

[spinbaby]

6. Happens here, too

I had a relative in a serious accident some years ago and the EMS crew did a called around before settling on a hospital. One hospital, at least, flatly refused him--they were too busy.

[bananas]

10. Japan is finally reaching American standards in health care

:sarcasm:

[fascisthunter]

15. gotta love the for profit health insurance system

making money at the expense of human life. Ahhhh... the Republican American dream...

[WriteDown]

16. Uh...

Japan does not have a "for profit" health system. They have UHC.

[treestar]

18. Doesn't prove universal health care is no good

No system is perfect. Presumably here the same thing might have happened. Well, not if he was an illegal alien. :sarcasm:

[Peace Patriot]

19. They (and we) should follow Cuba's example and provide FREE educations to doctors

and medical professionals. Cuba now has a surplus of doctors and medical professionals--in addition to having one of the best medical systems in the world--and exports doctors to poorer countries, to staff medical clinics in the poorest areas, and also flies thousands of poor people (or anyone) to Cuba to correct blindness in its famous eye clinics.

We, in capitalist countries, who brag about our supposed belief in human rights, routinely sacrifice lives for profit. You may not like Cuba's system, but you gotta admit they've done this right, deserve credit for it and provide a model of humanitarian virtue on medical care that is well worth studying and imitating.

[WriteDown]

22. Read and learn...

Its their xenophobia which is costing them as well as other factors.

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5i5XP-O252HC9opxHZ6aKgsXRKjqw

[WriteDown]

23. Apparently these dr's didn't appeciate Cuba as much

haha.

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Article.aspx?id=981

[Peace Patriot]

27. They get a FREE education in Cuba--no loans, no debt--from kindergarten thru

Doctor of Medicine, specialty training and internships, then they want to go to Miami, to make big bucks off our filthily corrupt medical system. I'll bet they never think of re-paying the Cuban people for all that education, plus housing, food, books and everything else they need.

The article mentions only a few examples of Cuban doctors who serve in other countries defecting, and fails to document any numbers. Cuba has some 30,000 doctors working in clinics for the poor in other countries, according to the article. If we believe their number that 100 have defected in Venezuela--and there is NO evidence for it--the article merely says "reportedly" (reported by whom? the CIA? Pfizer?)--and multiply it by, say, 10 countries (my guess at the number of countries that have Cuban med programs), that's 1,000, out of 30,000. That's about 3%. How many U.S. soldiers do you suppose are trained as jet pilots, and then abandon the AF for lucrative careers on commercial airlines? How many U.S. soldiers who get other kinds of training--medical, technical, management--leave military service and use the free training to then get private sector jobs? And how many get combat training and experience, and then go work for Blackwater or other mercenary companies for a hundred times the pay? I'll bet the percentages of all of these is more than 3%. Attrition happens. It doesn't prove anything. What DOES prove something, however, are the 29,000 doctors who perform these medical services, do a good job, love their work and DON'T defect. They could easily do so. Venezuela, Bolivia and most of the countries involved are free countries. They don't have police spies running around checking on doctors (except for the U.S. embassy--they do it, the fuckwads).

I thought it was interesting that one of the examples, of a Cuban doctor who defected, drove to Colombia, and sighed in relief, when he got over the border, "We're free!"--only to find out that he can't practice medicine in Colombia, and they're keeping him on a short leash, with only a 3-month visa. Free, indeed. Colombia is one of the least safe countries on earth--ruled by the brutal Colombian military and closely tied paramilitary death squads, and riddled with drug and weapons traffickers. Good luck to him! I hope he makes it to his land of dreams of money. I'm just glad that there are a lot MORE of the other kind of doctor, coming out of Cuba's medical schools, for whom medicine is work of mercy.

[KakistocracyHater]

24. They USED to be really good-got cancer? here's insurance

for you, wtf is happening over there? Who's stealing away their doctors? Sounds like they put an idiot in charge over there.