Los Angeles Dumping The Poor

Los Angeles. In the area known as Skid Row surveillance cameras captured the images of an elderly lady, dressed in slippers and a hospital gown wandering around aimlessly until the staff of the Union Rescue Mission were seen bringing her inside. The woman, 63 year-old Carol Ann Reyes of Gardena had been removed from a Kaiser Permanente hospital, put in a taxi and then dumped onto the streets of downtown Los Angeles like unwanted garbage.

Apparently this is not an isolated incident and city officials are now investigating the practice of hospitals and perhaps even law enforcement agencies of dumping the poor and homeless downtown. In a bit of damage control a spokesperson for Kaiser Permanente is claiming that after being unable to find shelter for Ms. Reyes that they had planned on transporting her to the Union Rescue Mission and are uncertain as to why she was just dumped on the street.

The reason is simple. In America if you are poor, unattractive or a minority then the government and big business see you as expendable. Human garbage. Kaiser Permanente may or may not be telling the truth about what happened to Ms. Reyes but one thing is certain, no insurance equals no room in the inn. They dumped this lady because to keep her in the hospital would have meant cutting into the profits and they couldn't have that. It was far better for the board of directors and the investors to just take a chance and put this human with little value into a taxi and dump her someplace like Skid Row. Make her someone elses problem.

I don't have all of the answers and I most definitely cannot spell out a workable fix for the poor and homeless in this country but it is time for all of us, myself included, to take a good look around and see just how cold and detatched we have become as a society. If it doesn't impact us directly then we do not care. It is one of the reasons why you continue to see stories like this in the media. Unless someone takes the time to slap a headline on a story, we could have cared less what became of Carol Ann Reyes. Even the politicians and city officials in Los Angeles have admitted that this is an ongoing problem but until the AP ran this story---> (L.A. Investigating Alleged Patient Dumping) nobody was willing to launch an investigation.


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