Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown of California continues with his mad liberal claim that if you just pass a law, things will get better.
His latest lunacy involves hospitals discharging homeless people … in many cases after they have received “free” care at taxpayer expense. And the state is full to the brim with homeless … it’s the “pigeon problem“. If you feed them they will come.
Here are the new regulations:
SB 1152 requires every hospital to include, as part of its hospital discharge policy, a written homeless patient discharge planning policy and process. As part of this policy, hospitals would be required to discharge a homeless patient to a safe and appropriate location.
SB 1152 requires hospitals, as part of the homeless patient discharge planning policy, to develop a written plan for coordinating services and referrals for homeless patients with the county behavioral health agency, health care and social services agencies in the region, health care providers, and nonprofit social services providers to assist with ensuring appropriate homeless patient discharge.
SB 1152 would also require the hospital to ensure that certain conditions are met as part of the discharge process of a homeless patient, including the following:
The patient has been offered a meal;
The patient has been offered weather-appropriate attire;
The patient has been provided with necessary medication, if the hospital has a retail pharmacy;
The patient has been offered appropriate vaccinations and screening for infectious diseases; and,
The hospital has offered the patient transportation to the discharge destination.
So the hospital is now daddy and mommy to every person in California. It has to give anyone who claims to be homeless a coat in winter, and presumably a t-shirt and bathing trunks in the summer.
The hospital has to give them a meal, and free medicine.
They have to screen them for any and all “infectious diseases” and give them free vaccinations.
Next, they cannot discharge them unless there is a “safe and appropriate location” for them.
Finally, they have to provide them with transportation to a “safe and appropriate location”.
I have great confidence that you can figure out whether this new piece of Democratic genius will increase or decrease the number of homeless in California …
For me, one of the biggest failings of liberals as opposed to say the Founding Fathers is that the Founding Fathers didn’t trust anyone, including each other. So they designed the Constitution and the government so that one group would keep the other group in check. Brilliant.
Governor Jerry Brown and his Democratic pals, on the other hand, never seem to think that folks might actually … gasp! … game the system. This does great credit to their hearts … but regarding their minds, not so much …
In that regard, consider the following possibility—I need a winter coat, so I go to a hospital for a hangnail and tell them I’m homeless. I’m not, of course, I just tell them I am, there’s no possible way to check.
As a result, I get a coat, a meal, checked for every imaginable disease, vaccinations for anything I choose, and an Uber ride to a location of my choice … duh.
The part I want to see is what the hospital will do when, as is far too often the case in California, there is no room in any local “safe and appropriate location.” No beds left at any local shelter, as is often the case. No room at the inn.
Under the new law, the hospitals now CANNOT discharge them … so what are they expected to do? Let them pitch their tents in the Emergency Room?
My solution?
Put them in an Uber and tell the driver to drop them off in front of the Governor’s Office in the State Capital … seems “safe and appropriate” to me.
If Governor Moonbeam wanted to bankrupt every hospital in California, he couldn’t have designed a better bill.
Californians, can we please, please come together and VOTE THESE IDIOTS OUT OF OFFICE?
w.
Skating Under The Ice 
private hospitals need to sue the state for the costs involved. But that will make them look ‘mean’, but some hospital needs to step up and be the first, before they go bankrupt.
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A large portion, perhaps the majority, of emergency room visits in California are addicts hoping for free opiates. It’s a standard tactic. You should link your previous essay on the evolution of pain killer policies with this one and you’ll see it’s actually worse than you wrote above.
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If there is no safe and apptopriate location to release the “patient” to, the hospital will have to keep them, taking up a bed that a sick person needs. That is already a problem at a small scale in Oregon.
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Sad but true, Al.
Welcome to the blog,
w.
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https://abc7news.com/health/doctors-medical-center-in-san-pablo-closing-tuesday/667216/
Friday, April 17, 2015
SAN PABLO, Calif. (KGO) — A San Pablo institution is closing in a few days. Doctors Medical Center has run out of money leaving thousands of patients without a local hospital.
…
Doctors Medical Center was operating on a deficit. The latest loss figure was $18 million a year.
The hospital was losing that much money because 90 percent of its patients are on Medicare or Medi-Cal. The hospital found it impossible to survive on those reimbursements which run as low as 60 cents on the dollar.
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I’ll guess that many of your fellow Californians will find the new regs great and reasonable.
The Founding Fathers did not give voting rights to the poor.
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Put them in an Uber and tell the driver to drop them off in front of the Governor’s Office in the State Capital … seems “safe and appropriate” to me.
Yup. I often wonder why people who are screwed over by their governments don’t camp out on the doorstep of the officials responsible for the problem.
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The problem is not calling the “homeless” people by the right names. One of those names is ‘drug addict’, another might be ‘mentally ill’, or ‘unemployable’, among others. ‘Homeless’ is a symptom, not a cause.
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For some, there should be some kind of institution to put them in. To keep them safe, and everybody else too. Maybe a CCC work camp. Useful work provided along with room and board.
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Lacking that, some countries have ‘refugee camps’ and others have ‘favelas’. But California is a refugee camp and already has slums right downtown.
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Seriously though, Sacramento, we have a problem. Some triage is needed.
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There’s a third major category that should be mentioned: Bums. None of these categories are politically correct since no one is responsible for their plight if there in one of the protected minorities according to the left. They’re all victims of course. Bums have probably always been around. Some people are just happy mooching off the rest of us.
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Californians, can we please, please come together (NO!) and VOTE THESE IDIOTS OUT OF OFFICE? (NO!)
Willis, you’re showing your “moonbeam” side, asking a question like that. ;-}
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“his mad liberal claim that if you just pass a law, things will get better.”
That’s what they want you to think. It’s magic. Ignore the unintended consequences, and there always are some even on the rare well thought out laws. The reality is that laws are a weapon, a dangerous weapon, and there ought to be a law against them.
A good example of the mad liberal claim is that we can fix the murder problem with gun control.
Take a look at this list and decide how many of these problems can be fixed with gun control.
https://www.businessinsider.com/most-violent-cities-in-the-world-2018-3#12-culiacan-mexico-had-7010-homicides-per-100000-residents-39
“These were the 50 most violent cities in the world in 2017”
Guns are dangerous, cultures can be even more dangerous.
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