From NewsScan:
WORTH THINKING ABOUT
: HOSPITAL "DUMPING"
In a memoir of his friend Rosalyn Yalow, the Nobel Laureate in Medicine, Eugene Straus tells the following sad (and cautionary) tale:
"When I arrived at the hospital, Rosalyn was gone. The house officer in the emergency room didn't remember her name, but he remembered a rather dirty old lady who had suffered a stroke. They had refused to admit her, or in technical lingo, she had been 'dumped.' Lots of old people stricken by strokes are dumped, since they may not be insured and thus would run up hospital costs to maintain them as they lie in a coma, waiting to expire. So they are transported instead to the municipal hospital, the place of last resort.
"The tragedy is not that a great icon of medicine had been dumped. It may be ironic that Yalow had often been invited to that hospital's parent university to lecture, to receive an honorary degree, and that the presidents and deans had lined up just to touch her hand, to be remembered, and the professors had hung on her every word. The tragedy is that a desperately ill human being had been turned away as have so many others like her.
"I had to find her. I would have gone to the nearest municipal hospital, but the house officer had remembered that when she eft his emergency room the ambulance driver said they would take her to Montefiore Hospital, a private institution near her home. When I arrived, her cardiologist, Ira Rubin, was at her bedside. 'She's comatose, and bleeding from the stomach,' he told me. 'They dumped her! Gene! Can you believe it!' "'Sure,' I said. 'She's not wearing that Nobel medallion around her neck. They saw a stroked-out senior citizen, no I.D., kind of ragged... a GOMER (Get Out of My Emergency Room).'"
See
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0738202630/newsscancom/ for "Rosalyn Yalow, Her Life and Work in Medicine," by Eugene Straus, M.D. -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy action programs.)