Free Republic

NAPLES - A southwest Florida man is accused of attacking a nurse and stripping off his clothes before flooding a hospital's emergency rooms. Louis Sepesi, 53, became agitated while in a waiting room at the North Collier Hospital in Naples, Florida, on Saturday, according to the Collier County Sheriff's Office. He barged into the emergency room, pushed a patient and then pushed a nurse in the head. After the hospital staff got him into a room in an effort to keep him from disturbing other patients, he took off his clothes and pulled a high-pressure water pipe from the wall,...

In a year that has been filled with so many mysteries already, I have another very odd one to share with you. Emergency rooms are filled to overflowing all over America, and nobody can seem to explain why this is happening. Right now, the number of new COVID cases in the United States each day is less than half of what it was just a couple of months ago. That is really good news, and many believe that this is a sign that the pandemic is fading. Let us hope that is true. With less people catching the virus, you...

Planned Parenthood: Emergency Rooms Overrun If We're Defunded Washington, DC -- Planned Parenthood officials defending the taxpayer funding the abortion business enjoys are out with a new claim that pro-life advocates find laughable as a supposed reason for federal dollars. http://www.lifenews.com/2011/04/06/planned-parenthood-emergency-rooms-overrun-if-were-defunded/

Interesting piece on managing wait-times in Canada: On Monday, Auditor General Jim McCarter released his annual report which found that despite putting an extra $200 million into shortening emergency room wait times over the last two years, "significant province-wide progress has not yet been made." "Complaints about overcrowding and delays in hospital emergency rooms have persisted for years," McCarter told a news conference on Monday. Emergency room waits for people with serious conditions sometimes reached 12 hours or more, the report said. That is far greater than the province's 8-hour wait time target, the report found. And for emergency patients...

ONE top argument for national health insurance turns out to be based on a false assumption. We've long been told that it's the uninsured who are clogging hospital ERs. Turns out that it's actually Medicaid and other insured patients behind most misuse of emergency-room care. Which means that health-care "reform" would make the problem worse. ERs are indeed dangerously overcrowded; having worked in a busy city ER for more than a decade, I can tell you that the "extra" patients interfere seriously with basic care. But the solution doesn't involve giving more people insurance coverage -- it requires turning more...

The uninsured are frequently vilified as “free riders” who receive care but shift the cost onto others—when they are not being portrayed as victims who don’t get as much medical care as some think they should. Thus they deserve punishment by higher taxes if they don’t accept their “individual responsibility” to buy costly insurance—or else public subsidies to buy “coverage” (instead of public payment for care actually received). The problem is purportedly magnified by overuse of the more costly emergency room by uninsured patients who delayed care they should have gotten sooner from a lower-cost primary physician. In fact, the...

Since Arizona’s local law enforcement began enforcing illegal immigration laws and an employer sanctions law went into effect, illegal immigrants have been fleeing the state in large numbers. The effects have been far-ranging. Commuters are reporting fewer vehicles on the freeways, shortening their rush-hour commutes. What had become a serious transportation problem in Arizona is losing its urgency. English Learner Language (ELL) students started dropping out of school. This helped end a confrontation between the state legislature and a liberal federal judge who had ordered the state to spend more money on ELL classes. Fewer illegal immigrants are using hospital...

Healthcare for illegal immigrants between the ages of 18 and 64 cost American taxpayers $1.1 billion in 2000 — or about $11 per household — according to a study released Tuesday by the Rand Corp. The research, published in the November/December edition of the journal Health Affairs, put the cost in Los Angeles County that year at $204 million. "There are taxpayer implications to illegal immigration, but healthcare is not one of them," said Jim Smith, a senior economist with Rand and author of the study. "Why are we talking about healthcare when that's only $1 billion a year?" The...

Los Angeles County emergency rooms turned away paramedic ambulances 8% more often in 2005 than a year earlier, with some major hospitals closed more than half the time, according to data from the county Emergency Medical Services Agency. Public hospitals such as County-USC and Harbor/UCLA medical centers closed to ambulances an average of about 20 hours a day while some private hospitals — including Pasadena's Huntington Hospital, Bellflower Medical Center and Lynwood's St. Francis Medical Center — closed for 12 hours or more.

If you’re an "undocumented" illegal immigrant, and you need medical attention–well, get on the "gravy train" for free healthcare compliments of our government, and struggling taxpayers to the tune of $1 billion smackeroos, set aside for your medical costs in six states. There’s only one small hurdle, but I’m sure you’ve already had a lot of practice in getting past the hurdle before. It is quite simple: just don’t admit that you’re an illegal immigrant. And to help you beat the system, and get by with your illegal activity–congress has ordered the "don’t ask" policy to hospital staffs throughout the...

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- For more than 80 years, the San Jose Medical Center has served as a lifeline for the South Bay. On Thursday, the hospital closed its doors forever. The last four patients were moved to other hospitals Wednesday, and the San Jose Medical Center Officially closed at 5 p.m. Thursday -- closing the door on a history of births, breakthroughs in patient care and trauma services, NBC11's Marianne Favro reported. When the San Jose Medical Center first opened in 1923, the pathology lab consisted of Mason jars and microscopes. The hospital later went on to become one...

<p>It's a routine day at Los Angeles County's Harbor-UCLA Medical Center's emergency room: By 3 p.m., every bed is filled. The waiting room is packed with an additional 60 patients. An elderly man on crutches says dejectedly that he's been waiting 17 hours to see a doctor.</p>