Friday, August 23, 2013

San Fran's False Medical Dumping Claim

What a pathetic story from the San Fran Chronicle: Timothy Martin is deaf, blind and homeless, and in April he stumbled off a one-way ride from a Reno mental hospital onto the streets of San Francisco.
He found his way to a bar in the Castro neighborhood where, he says, he was thrown out and wound up crying on the sidewalk until an ambulance took him to San Francisco General Hospital.
Since then, the 47-year-old Martin has lost a leg, run up hundreds of thousands of dollars in emergency medical bills, and landed in the city's Laguna Honda long-term rehabilitation hospital.
City investigators suspect this is an extreme example of "Greyhound therapy" - the alleged practice by medical officials in Nevada of dumping indigent or homeless patients on the city.....
"The doctor in Reno wanted me to leave the hospital. ... He told me to come here to San Francisco," Martin, who in addition to being deaf and blind cannot speak, said through an interpreter. "They bought my ticket.
"I never want to go back to Nevada. I hate it there."   http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Deaf-blind-man-called-example-of-patient-4754815.php
So, the guy hates Nevada, so, he didn't want to stay.
Martin's 50-year-old sister, Theresa Mellen of Santa Clara, said her brother lived in Nevada for almost two decades and has been shipped to San Francisco by medical centers in Reno "at least six times in the past couple of years."
That also means California sent him back to Nevada 6 times.  Who is shipping their patients elsewhere?
He began going in and out of hospitals on emergency visits for diabetic and high blood pressure difficulties, Mellen said. She and her three siblings tried to place him in group homes or government-subsidized apartments, but Mellen said her brother would become restless or unhappy with the arrangements and strike out on his own.
Mellen said Martin has no severe mental illness, but often ended up in psychiatric care wards - sometimes involuntarily - because of his range of disabilities.
"We just want him to be happy, maybe in a board-and-care home," Mellen said. "Believe me, if I could buy him a house or just make all his medical troubles go away, I would - but I and my family can't afford that."
So, he has no family in Nevada, he can't be held unless he is a danger to himself, he doesn't want to stay in homes provided for him and his family is in California.  We don't if he told the hospital staff that he wanted to go to California.
This guy is more of a Californian than he is a Nevadan and he should remain in California.

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