I get everything that Justice Duarte says here. All of the causes of action brought by Siskiyou Hospital apparently fail for lack of a cognizable legal basis.
But doesn't it bother you that the County of Siskiyou does indeed seem to be "dumping" mental illness patients at Siskiyou Hospital?
I understand that the County (e.g., police officers) might reasonably want to make sure that people who might be acting crazy aren't doing so because of an underlying medical -- as opposed to psychiatric -- reason. So it makes sense to initially take them to a hospital. Even a tiny, 25-bed hospital like the one here. It has an emergency room. The hospital can medically clear them fairly rapidly.
But after they're medically cleared, it seems like, on numerous occasions, the County basically just leaves them there. Sure, they sent over a crisis worker to evaluate the patient. But then the patient typically just sits there. The County doesn't actually transfer the patient to a mental health facility (as it's required to do) to receive mental health services for a fair piece of time -- on average, it takes most of the day, and at times, the County has left people in the hospital for weeks without providing any mental health services. The whole time, the hospital has to take care of the person and doesn't get paid, while the County sits on its butt and doesn't have to provide any of the services that the Medicaid Act requires.
That sounds wrong, no?
And we're not talking about a small number of people here. It's a 25-bed hospital, but the County dumps 200 to 300 people there every year. That's a lot. Especially for a small county like this one.
I'd have liked to have seen a little more concern -- even if it was just extralegal concern -- in the opinion for the hospital's plight. As well as for the plight of the underlying patients. Perhaps there's indeed no actionable legal cause of action. But surely this is not the way things should operate. It'd be nice to have at least said that somewhere.
