I've Found a Way to Get Rich

A few days ago, one of the people I work with complained of chest pain and was taken to the hospital. Transported, I mean. The ingredient of a medical vehicle being the difference there.
Anyway, he was taken to the hospital where they decided to keep him overnight and run a bunch of tests. The next day, they tried to send him home. Great, right? Not in this case. Twenty-four hours later he still had not been able to see a Doctor and they had not figured out what was wrong with him. They were sending him home because they were full.

This is something that you'd expect in Chicago, in a State hospital that maybe takes patients that don't have insurance, etc. It's not supposed to happen in a hospital that is brand new and has had it's doors open for less than six months. It actually gets worse. The hospital apparently has a policy that your Doctor cannot come and see you. They want private doctors to see a patient every five minutes (I'm sorry, that's impossible, don't you think?) so they employ their doctors to come and see you. I guess, if they are too busy, you are SOL. So in the end they wound up prescribing him about 10 different drugs and home he went-- without knowing the cause of his pain.

Now, I was about to swear off our local hospital when a conversation with one of our elected officials made me come up short. We were joking about all the stuff you could potentially be sent home for, "Oh, sorry, you cut off a leg. Well, we're really busy right now. You'll have to come back tomorrow." Then, out of the blue he said, "Oh, you need to get out of doing something with the wife?"

LMAO... where the heck did that come from?! Then I realized-- it's entirely possible the hospital has an "in" on how to make more money.

Let's say you have something that you want to get out of doing like work, or helping the wife/husband, or getting chicken blood for bird flu study in Indonesia. You fake serious illness and get transported to the hospital. When there, they present you with the regular admittance forms, but at the bottom there is a little check box that read "Check here if you are simply faking it."

They charge, say, $1000, put you in a room for the night, give you a bunch of tic-tacs in prescription bottles, and send you home with instructions not to work, not to drive, not to lift anything, stating that the hospital is too full to keep you. Of course, they don't want your Doctor- or any Doctor- to see you because then they would realize you are not really sick!

Freakin' Genius.

I need to open up my own hospital. If I could just get around the "seeing actual sick people" and whole "insurance fraud" things, I'd be set.