Our care is so lousy we wouldn’t have helped this guy anyway

Long wait in Parkland hospital ER may have cost ex-restaurateur his life

But had Mr. Herrera been seen sooner, Dr. Anderson said, he may have been treated and sent home – with the same final result.

Mr. Herrera’s death follows years of warnings about excessive wait times in the emergency department of Dallas County’s charity hospital, which serves the indigent and others without health insurance.

The real scandal, of course, is the disastrous underfunding of the hospital, but then this is Texas we’re talking about…

Two other things strike me from the article, the first being the medical examiner’s catch-all “clogged arteries” cause of death (when someone is reporting severe abdominal pain, they typically have something more proximate going on, like a specific blocked artery, or bleeding, or a list as long as your arm.) It’s like saying a stroke victim died because they were old. The second is the huge crock about not being able to do anything to address ER waiting times until some huge addition is built to the hospital — it would certainly be nice to be able to admit people to the hospital instead of stacking them like cordwood in the halls of the emergency department, but couldn’t you just staff up to treat them where they are?

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