‘These Are Real People’

Indeed. Words spoken today by Lindsay Jones, attorney representing the dialysis patients who have been given a death sentence by the decision to close Grady Dialysis Clinic in Atlanta, GA (see “Do I Have the Right To Live?” and the original post on this story “Grady Hospital Tells Dialysis Patients to Leave or Die.”). Last week the judge in the case ruled that the patients didn’t have any constitutional rights (what about the ones with green cards? You have to be a citizen to have rights? Oh really? What about the right to LIVE?) and pulled the temporary restraining order. Today at the Fulton-DeKalb Hospital Authority (which oversees the Grady Memorial Hospital Corporation, which runs the hospital) run by Pamela Stephenson the Authority announced that it supported the decision to pay for three months of dialysis and then cut themselves loose from patients without insurance or Medicaid. One of them made a little speech about how we should get the other counties in Georgia to help pay for Grady. They said that they were going to make sure that everyone would get appropriate transition, and when we said that the patients had not been told that, Michael Young the CEO of Grady started shouting at us. But then four women stood up who said that they had not even been informed that they got three more months let alone would get help transitioning to other care! (whatever that might be). One of them had already bought her ticket back to Honduras. Last week A.D. “Pete” Correll, ex-head of Georgia Pacific Corporation, shouted at us that Grady was losing too much money. All of this is of course cruel and inhumane and makes me ashamed to be part of a community that just tosses human beings aside like so much garbage. As Dorothy Leone-Glasser of the Grady Advocates for Responsible Care, said, “I don’t know how anyone involved in Grady can sleep at night because I can tell you that none of the patients that we know about — 34 of them — and their families will be able to sleep at night. I dont’ know how they can do it.”