Health Care Rant (Non-Obama Care)

Last Thursday my dad mentioned that he was feeling bad.  Nothing specific.  Just generally felt bad and tired.  When he said he was too tired to get up to go to the bathroom, my mother diagnosed him as having a heart attack.  (All vines are poison ivy.  All dogs have rabies.  All fatigue and  pain above the belt and below the neck is a heart attack).  She gave him a nitroglycerine tablet and called the ambulance.

Dad has dementia.  By the time the ambulance got to the house, he had forgotten why they were there.  They hooked him up to their machines and decided to take him to the hospital.  After several hours, the doctor decided that he was dehydrated.  Its common with dementia.  The doctor  kept him for a few days while they pumped him full of fluids.  Dad has a temper and a vocabulary and didn't like being there so they also gave him some sort of happy pills too.  Combined with the dementia, those always send him off to fantasy land.

Some time during his stay, a "social worker" stopped by and asked him questions.  Why a social worker was there asking questions is beyond me but one did.  In his slightly drugged and more than slightly senile state of mind, he told the social worker that he was homeless and all his children were deceased.

He was supposed to come home early this afternoon but was overdue so my mother called to find out what was going on.   Care to guess what was going on?  The social worker had gotten to a computer and put in dad's record that he was homeless and all his children were deceased so the hospital was keeping him until they could find some kind of indigent shelter to send him to.

Seriously.  Those  ass-wipes were about to send him to some homeless shelter because some blithering idiot of a "social worker" took a statement from a drugged and senile old man and didn't bother to check to see if he was, oh, I don't know,  maybe drugged or maybe senile.  Didn't bother to look at his record that showed the ambulance picked him up at his house, that his wife was the one that called the ambulance and that his daughter had Power of Attorney to make medical decisions for him at the hospital.   Nope.  This highly trained professional just said "he's homeless and his family is dead.  Find a shelter that will take him."  The social worker didn't bother to find out if what my dad said was true and nobody at the hospital bothered to check either.  

Dad finally made it home this evening despite the best efforts of the social worker and the hospital staff.   I wonder where he'd be if mother hadn't gotten worried and made that call.