Centerfield

Can everybody really be this mellow today? Or is it the weather?

Bush fatigue

Appalling.

This gives new meaning to recycling in Congress. [Don't watch during dinner]

Hattip: Redstate

My pet peeve today is being run by the 2nd team.

Rather more than a fair share of high US gummint, er, talent came from Texas. Especially Central Texas.

But the GOP runs Texas as well, basically on the 2nd team. Texas contracts are wimpily negotiated, not, so much, I believe because of malfeasance as because of lack of talent. It feels to me like just about every aspect of state govt is worse-run than before 2000; I mean, you don't expect great government in Texas, but it used to be better.

Tully;
Re: Appalling While I don't necessarily condone the "dumping", it is a difficult problem when you've admitted a homeless individual from the ER (brought in by ambulance) who no longer needs to be in the hospital, who doesn't have a place to stay and refuses to go to the shelter.

When I did hospital work at an inner-city hospital we had one homeless woman who at discharge received a cab voucher and sought transport to a city park, her "home". What's a hospital to do?

Chris--this was a colostomized paraplegic (with obvious "mental health" issues) dressed in nothing but a hospital gown and a broken colostomy bag, "released" by being dumped on a skid row sidewalk in February without a wheelchair, left to drag himself along on the ground. Pretty damn tough to condone in ANY light. He did not "refuse" to go to a shelter. He was dumped. Follow-up story here. Lotta finger-pointing going on, but the expanded info does not make the hospital look better.

It was apparently the hospital's SECOND attempt to "discharge" the patient. On their first they took him in an ambulance to a shelter in the middle of the night without contacting the shelter first. (Do it in the dark...) On review, it appears the ambulance drivers themselves were the ones who returned him to the hospital, after realizing he had no wheelchair, no after-care istructions, and was not in fit condition for release to the shelter. The next shift at the hospital followed orders and got him out of there a bit less formally by driving him to the vicinity of the same shelter.

The hospital blames the shelter, but the shelter has tapes of the first incident. It's pretty damn obvious the hospital did NOT step through the hoops and follow ANY of the protocols for shelter transfer--such as notifying the shelter. And to state the obvious, this person may not have required acute care but he most certainly required some care.

The Hosital Assn. is saying that the hosptal failed to follow its own protocols. DUH.

I don't excuse the city of Los Angeles, either. This sort of thing happens when local officials let it happen. It's a recurring problem in LA.

Oh, and a note to posters. CLOSE YOUR COMMENTS after a week or so, and clean out comment spam when it appears. I just cleaned out several hundred comment spams form a fairly recent thread. No reason for that. If it keeps happening, the server provider will initiate another site shutdown to shut off the sab traffic.

Just sayin'.