A For-Profit Hospital Slashed Costs. Then a Patient Froze to Death on Its Roof

orangeboats

It sounds ridiculous to me that a hospital could be "for profit". It is supposed to be a public infrastructure, folks!

jmole

It doesn't help that most hospitals essentially objectify patients these days. When you are a patient, you are not a person, you are an object of medical care. There is an algorithm, a schedule; the arrival of new doctors and nurses at each shift change. They meet and talk with each other about how their objects are doing, and then they'll check in on you with a formal hello, 30 seconds of conversation, and then they'll leave. If a patient has signs of mental illness, the providers draw straws to see who has the unlucky job of: "talk to the patient, but gently remind them that they are an object on a medical assembly line and probably nothing is going to happen until the next doctor comes around". I don't know if hospitals have always been this way, or if we just romanticized them in the old movies. But unless you have a specific problem that medical intervention can solve (e.g., a medicine or a procedure), you are effectively a nobody, and there is nobody there that cares about you - at least for the definition of care that matters to most humans.

ratelimitsteve

The part where they blatantly lied to the patient's family, saying they found their loved one's body at a Dollar General down the road, then in the parking lot, then finally admitting that they were on the roof after gaining access to a secure area because the door was propped open, that's the part that to my mind should result in the harshest criminal charges. It won't though. Because someone made money, and money is the only legal, moral or ethical force in our society today.