Do These People Have Parents?

I was totally sputtering when trying to yell at the radio while listening to this on NPR last week. I mean I could feel steam coming out of my ears and total gibberish was coming out of my mouth because I couldn't form words! What kind of monsterous and hideous hospital (and employees) would do something like this?

For many months, Los Angeles city officials have complained that regional hospitals are dropping off their indigent patients in the city's tough Skid Row area. On Wednesday, officials at a homeless shelter released a videotape that allegedly catches one hospital in the act. The incident has become part of an ongoing investigation that could result in criminal or civil penalties.

Security cameras outside the Union Rescue Mission, the city's largest homeless shelter, show a taxi pulling a U-turn in front of the building. Several seconds later, an elderly woman in a hospital gown shuffles into view. She appears to have only hospital socks on her feet, and walks in the street for a while before turning back to the mission entrance.

Mission worker Regina Chambers met the woman outside, later identified as Carol Reyes, a homeless resident of the city of Gardena, a dozen miles south of downtown Los Angeles.

'When I first approached her, she was very disoriented, didn't know where she was or what she was doing,' Chambers says. 'All she knew is that she had been to a hospital.'

It was later determined that Reyes was released from the Kaiser Permanente hospital in the city of Bellflower, 16 miles southeast of the mission.

They say that you can judge a society by the way it treats its young and elderly. I think if you add poor to that (and many times the young and old fall into this category as well) you have a perfect picture of the kind of country America is. I just cannot get this out of my mind!

In the broadcast, they commented on how the Kaiser spokesperson looked "stricken." Well, she should have looked stricken and been stricken. There is absoultely no excuse for dumping a sick, old woman out on the street in a hospital gown and no shoes! I don't think I could even work for any institution that did things like that. I wonder which attendent called the cab and gave them the address of the mission? I wonder who would put a patient out on the street with no clothes? What kind of human beings go along with this? How can someone accept a check from a place like that?