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subscribeThe Hospital of the Living Dead and why Universal Health Care is bullshit
boqueen was in pain.
Not “ouch that hurts” pain, but “I am too goddamn young to confront my own mortality” pain. What started as minor abdominal discomfort had become debilitating agony.
boqueen decided to go to the emergency room. Like 630 billion other Americans, she is uninsured. And like any uninsured Chicagoan, she sought care at John H. Stroger Hospital, the city’s largest public hospital.
We traded text messages as she sat in a waiting room with hundreds of other patients, waiting to have her number called. Nervous and concerned, I offered to come to the hospital and wait with her. She repeatedly declined, assuring me that she would be seen soon.
We both knew better. Stroger Hospital is notorious for exceptionally long waiting times.
After four hours, her number had been called. Her blood pressure had been taken and she was asked to return to the waiting room to be called again.
boqueen considered transferring to another more efficient hospital. I got in my truck and headed out to Stroger Hospital, with the intentions of taking her to an ER that takes a fleeting interest in actually treating patients.
As I drove to the hospital, boqueen’s name was called. We both knew the waiting game was far from over.
::
“Emergency?” We use the term very loosely.
When I arrived at the hospital, I was stunned by the number of people in the emergency room waiting area. The room was nearly filled to capacity. There was a sea of sick people sitting in cheap plastic chairs – at 11 p.m., I counted over 250 people in the crowd.
The waiting room at Stroger Hospital is one of the most depressing places in North America. Tired and sick people wasted away as they endured an endless wait. A man held a bloody towel tightly to a gunshot wound on his arm. A woman, presumably with whooping cough, barked out loudly and showered nearby patients with droplets of diseased phlegm. The room reeked of sweaty ass. A visible cloud of germs hovered above the crowd.
I wondered how many of the patient’s conditions were being exasperated by being forced to wait for hours on end for treatment.
I found an area with a few open chairs and, against my better judgment, I took a seat. I was tempted to read the copy of the Chicago Sun Times that sat on the floor next to me but I thought better of the idea, for fear of contracting cholera from the germ-ridden pages.
After a few minutes, a patient wearing a surgeon’s mask sat down next to me. While the mask was surely meant to prevent the man’s disease from spreading, I did not feel comfortable sitting next to Patient Zero. I decided to wander around the hospital instead.
::
As I strolled through the halls of the hospital, boqueen and I continued to communicate using text messages. The blow-by-blow account of her treatment was agonizing. She underwent three different tests, with waiting periods of at least an hour between each.
After the tests, it was determined that boqueen had a bacterial infection. The doctors explained that she would be given a shot of antibiotics, and that she would have to return the following day to pick up her prescription.
“A lady in scrubs finally just said to me ‘I’ll be right with you,’” she wrote, one hour after receiving the diagnosis, “Which obviously means another forty-five hours.”
boqeen arrived at the hospital just before 6 p.m. She received her diagnosis at 12:45 a.m.
We left the hospital at 3 a.m.
Over the course of nine hours, boqueen had spent approximately 30 minutes dealing with actual medical professionals.
::
We returned to the hospital a few hours later, just after noon. Our task was simple: pick up a boqueen’s medication.
We neglected the fact that no task is simple in the confines of Stroger Hospital.
After waiting in line for over a half hour, boqueen was told by the pharmacy that they had no record of her in the computer system: no prescription record, no patient record – nothing.
She spent the following two hours sorting out the matter between the emergency room, hospital administration and the pharmacy.
She was told that her prescription would be ready by 3:30. At 3:30, she was told to come back an hour later. At 4:30, she was told to come back an hour later. At 5:30, she told to come back an hour later.
boqueen finally got her prescription at 7 p.m., nearly seven hours after arriving at the hospital.
::
As we left the hospital, boqueen was both frustrated and relieved. “Just be thankful that you don’t have to return to this shit hole,” I said.
“This is exactly why socialized medicine will never work,” boqueen replied.
I was stunned to hear those words come out of boqueen’s mouth. She is quite liberal and, while not a Kool-Aid drinker, an enthusiastic supporter of President Obama (D-Nazareth). I had never expected to hear her decry the concept of Universal Health Care that so many liberals are fond of.
Stroger Hospital is the perfect case study to illustrate why the government should not run a health care facility, let alone the nation’s entire health care system. Politicians are barely able to perform their jobs as it is, as evidenced by the budget deficits plaguing states across the nation and a country as a whole. Furthermore, governments in the United States are inherently inefficient. When these same inefficiencies creep into our health care system, as they do in Cook County, the patients suffer.
Finally, politicians are simply not qualified to make decisions about health care. Today, most politicians have backgrounds in law. I certainly want don’t someone who is a trial lawyer today to make decisions about how I will be treated by my doctor tomorrow. I shudder at the notion of an ass-clown like Senator Roland Burris (D-Hundred Acre Woods) being entrusted to make such important decisions.
If you are still convinced that socialized medicine is a good idea, I invite you to visit Stroger Hospital in Chicago. You may reconsider your ideas as bathe in Lysol to disinfect every square inch of your body.
::
I fully realize that boqueen’s story isn’t unique. Many hospitals simply do not have the amount staff needed to treat the increasing number of patients in their emergency rooms.
However, the long wait times and poor care that boqueen experienced were not simply a result of a lack of staff. She explained that the emergency room was filled far beyond its capacity. Patients were being treated on beds in hallways and behind any curtain that could be found. Stroger Hospital does not have an adequate number of beds to keep up with the demand for care in the emergency room.
This is absolutely appalling, considering that Stroger Hospital opened in December of 2002. The hospital was built from the ground up to replace the aging Cook County Hospital.
Cook County Hospital had long had a reputation for a poor level of care and epic waiting times for treatment. The Cook County Board and the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board worked on the plan for the new hospital in the mid 1990s. The day the new hospital opened, the emergency rooms were not able to keep up with patient demand.
Quadrillions of taxpayer money was spent building a state-of-the-art facility that already desperately needs to be expanded. The county government approved this shortsighted plan and patted themselves on the back for supposedly improving public health care.
The absurd ineptitude of those running the Cook County government is something to behold. The fact that those same imbeciles are responsible for decisions pertaining to boqueen’s health care scares the living shit out of me.
::
While the finishing touches were being placed on the hospital, the Cook County Board voted to name the hospital after John Stroger (D-Machine), who was board president at the time. The honor was meant to recognize his alleged commitment to providing quality health care for the County’s poor residents.
If I were Stroger, I would have declined such recognition. He knew of the problems that plagued the previous hospital, and he would have been delusional to think the same problem wouldn’t exist today.
Stroger made a key decision about his legacy. For patients of the hospital, “Stroger” will forever be synonymous with “failure.” Were I John Stroger, I would be rolling in my grave every single time the doors to the emergency room opened.
The hospital besmirches the Stroger family name even more than the astonishing incompetence of current Board President Todd Stroger (D-Daddy).
6 responses to 'The Hospital of the Living Dead and why Universal Health Care is bullshit'
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This is an excellent piece. Nice work, bokeen. Tell boqueen I still feel bad for her ordeal.
W. Povich
04.17.09 12:40 AM
Fantastic–and hilarious–recap of your personal County Circus experience. That was quite the harrowing ordeal–one that I wouldn’t ever wish on my worst enemy. It was absolutely unbelievable. Patient Zero with the SARS mask? I stayed FAR AWAY from him. Thank you for taking care of me over those few miserable days.
<3
boqueen
04.20.09 03:19 AM
[...] Bokeen notes the difficulty of his friend boqueen in obtaining care at Stroger Hospital in Chicago. Boqueen was at the hospital for a painful condition that was diagnosed as a bacterial infection after arriving at the hospital at 6 PM and being discharged at 3 AM. During the wait, he counted more than 250 patients in the waiting room. The following day, boqueen spent 7 hours trying to obtain her prescription from the Stroger Hospital pharmacy. Bokeen noted “Stroger Hospital is the perfect case study to illustrate why the government should not run a health care facility, let alone the nation’s entire health care system … governments in the United States are inherently inefficient. When these same inefficiencies creep into our health care system, as they do in Cook County, the patients suffer.” [...]
Access to Medicine Articles 04-22-09 « WhiteCoat’s Call Room
04.22.09 01:43 PM
I’ve just had an argument with the company that picks up my trash (our county has chosen to outsource this function). It happens that the company is blatantly, demonstrably in the wrong. This proves that private industry is incapable of handling important functions like this. In fact, over my 55 years of life, there have been any number of goods I’ve bought and found wanting, services that haven’t been performed as I expected, and customer service I’ve found appalling in nearly every part of the private sector. Clearly, private industry is incapable of getting anything right.
Democracy is that form of government in which everyone gets what the majority deserve.
brighid
04.23.09 10:04 AM
Boqueen – you shouldn’t have had to go through all that! But it seems all too typical of Crook County, not to mention the rest of the state…
The Illinois Toll Highway Robbery Authority ought to put effigies of such luminaries as Mayor Richie “M is for Mushmouth” Daley (D-Dumb), former Gov. Rod “Big Hair” Blagojevich (D-Dumber), Sen. Roland “I didn’t say nuthin to nobody” Burris, Toddlin’ Todd Stroger, Ald. Dick “I told her not to marry that idiot” Mell, “Quarters” and “Matches” Boyle, along with other members of the cast of thousands of incompetent, corrupt IL politicians in the tollbooths and on the baskets in the coin lanes for the citizenry’s amusement.
k
04.23.09 07:16 PM
Uhm, bokeen?
You stated the underlying reason for your horrible experience right at the beginning of the post: “Like 630 billion other Americans, she is uninsured. And like any uninsured Chicagoan, she sought care at John H. Stroger Hospital”
It is precisely because there is no universal coverage that ERs are overloaded and horrible, because that’s the only place the uninsured get “care”.
And who says the government has to run the hospitals and making healthcare decisions for you? All they are supposed to do is setup a system where everybody has insurance (Btw. are there any 1st world countries besides the USA that do not have universal coverage, I don’t think so, Monaco maybe where everybody is stinking rich and pays cash anyway)
And yeah I have been to ERs in countries with universal coverage, and it sucks there too. But at least you and your 1/2 inch gash in the thumb that you want stitched are waiting 2hrs because the staff is busy reviving a head on collision victim, not because they are dealing with a bum’s infected ingrown toenail (true story from US).
lifecrisis
04.26.09 01:32 PM