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Simply ordering hospitals to accept patients is not the solution. The government should provide additional financial incentives to encourage more medical institutions to go along with the plan.

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Yoshihito Niki, a visiting professor of internal medicine at Showa University in Tokyo who specializes in infectious diseases. He was commenting on a government plan to impose penalties on designated hospitals that don’t accept patients suffering from any new forms of infectious diseases in the future after there were not enough hospitals that would accept COVID-19 cases last year.

© Asahi Shimbun

©2024 GPlusMedia Inc.

17 Comments
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The govt pays these hospitals through national insurance reimbursements. Without those funds, these hospitals couldn't exist. The govt therefore can exert as much leverage as it wants over hospitals that turn down sick patients.

9 ( +9 / -0 )

its weird.

all of us paying health insurance.these money gov using for hospitals.

question.

how its possible that hospital can reject anyone in trouble with health?

with valid health insurance?

if hospital wont take care who should do than?

some ghosts or...?

Hippocratic oath?No clue yet?Or we are talking just about pure business...

9 ( +9 / -0 )

Rejecting a patient should be a crime punishable by law.

9 ( +9 / -0 )

Seigi beat me to what I was going to write, so I'll just agree with Seigi.

7 ( +7 / -0 )

If a hospital is close to bankruptcy and can only mantain itself by not accepting risky patients (so all other patients still use their services) penalties are not going to improve this, and instead the place will be lost making the situation worse.

-6 ( +1 / -7 )

Simply ordering hospitals to accept patients is not the solution. The government should provide additional financial incentives to encourage more medical institutions to go along with the plan.

Japan, like many other countries, is underreporting its Covid related deaths. It pressures potential patients to stay at home with their Covid symptoms.

Instead of ordering the hospitals to accept patients, make it a criminal act to refuse patients.

0 ( +3 / -3 )

Japan, like many other countries, is underreporting its Covid related deaths. It pressures potential patients to stay at home with their Covid symptoms.

Any source to demonstrate this happens in any significant quantity? how many deaths are hidden this way? 1%, 0.1%?

-6 ( +1 / -7 )

As an occasional sufferer of kidney stones (the pain is beyond description at times), I have on occasion shown up at emergency rooms without calling first sometimes at "early" hours of the morning.

They almost universally look confused and put out that I didn't call ahead. I don't do so on purpose because I don't want to hear "we don't have a specialist."

I mean, it's not rocket science. Hang an IV. Turn it on wide open. Put some serious pain-killers in it. Mega-hydrate and hope it gets flushed out. Any intern can do it and most of the time, that is who does it.

And this is not a critical care issue. I mean, it hurts like hell, but I am not at risk of death. Yet hospitals with operational emergency rooms have attempted to refuse me care before (yes, I have insurance.)

I heartily agree with above posters. I do not see how a hospital can ethically or legally refuse care to patients in need. It's just not right.

4 ( +4 / -0 )

When you have a monopoly on training medical personnel, monopoly over drug distribution and sales, and regulations that prevent any competition, you must accept the patients. These are not sales of consumer goods or something, people die when turned away.

The thing is that for many places this means not doing anything then. The system has a monopoly, but the individual places are not that resourceful, if they are given extra responsibilities that will impact their profit and no support the only solution left for them is to close their doors and see which big and expensive hospital has room for one extra doctor. At the end you can't force a business to lose money, you can only force it to close.

-5 ( +0 / -5 )

RecklessJune 24  05:51 pm JST

When you have a monopoly on training medical personnel, monopoly over drug distribution and sales, and regulations that prevent any competition, you must accept the patients.

Excellent point and excellent idea.

Any source to demonstrate this happens in any significant quantity? how many deaths are hidden this way? 1%, 0.1%?

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Tokyo-s-excess-deaths-far-higher-than-COVID-19-count-data-shows

Settled that.

-3 ( +1 / -4 )

Settled that.

So you only had to go back more than two years to find an example of a supposed (not even confirmed) underreporting because of not recognizing the new disease? and this is 200 out of a total of 30,000? obviously not even close to the over 90% underreported deaths from China, which are even recognized by their own Chinese experts.

There is no comparison possible between the amount of expected underreporting from not being able to recognized every single case in Japan and the systematically hiding of deaths done by the government of China.

0 ( +2 / -2 )

So you only had to go back more than two years to find an example of a supposed (not even confirmed) underreporting because of not recognizing the new disease? and this is 200 out of a total of 30,000? obviously not even close to the over 90% underreported deaths from China, which are even recognized by their own Chinese experts. 

There is no comparison possible between the amount of expected underreporting from not being able to recognized every single case in Japan and the systematically hiding of deaths done by the government of China.

As mentioned above, this is settled already.

0 ( +2 / -2 )

As mentioned above, this is settled already.

Japan does not have even comparable number of underreported deaths, so if you accept it is settled that means you have given up trying to argue against it.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

Japan does not have even comparable number of underreported deaths, so if you accept it is settled that means you have given up trying to argue against it.

Medical professionals would provide verifiable sources and not repeat the same falsity hoping it becomes a reality, so let's look at some legitimate sources to reveal what the reality is, not what you want it to be:

    “[The true death toll] is two or three times higher than the number of deaths we know about.” – Amber D’Souza, Prof. of Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

 “Whatever number is reported is going to be a gross underestimate.” – Tim Riffe, a demographer at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany.”

And another source:

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Tokyo-s-excess-deaths-far-higher-than-COVID-19-count-data-shows

Settled.

-1 ( +2 / -3 )

Medical professionals would provide verifiable sources and not repeat the same falsity hoping it becomes a reality, so let's look at some legitimate sources to reveal what the reality is, not what you want it to be:

So, you could not find any source that says the number of deaths is 10 times higher as it is in China? that clearly demonstrates it is then impossible to compare systematically hiding the deaths with not being able to report it accurately.

Specially since your example from Japan is from the very beginning of the pandemic and it is about an excess of mere 200.

Interesting to see that you contradicted yourself and now recognize it was not settled at all since you keep trying to argue about it.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

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