Health
Related: About this forumChefs, Butlers, Marble Baths: Hospitals Vie for the Affluent
The feverish patient had spent hours in a crowded emergency room. When she opened her eyes in her Manhattan hospital room last winter, she recalled later, she wondered if she could be hallucinating: This is like the Four Seasons where am I?
The bed linens were by Frette, Italian purveyors of high-thread-count sheets to popes and princes. The bathroom gleamed with polished marble. Huge windows displayed panoramic East River views. And in the hush of her $2,400 suite, a man in a black vest and tie proffered an elaborate menu and told her, Ill be your butler.
It was Greenberg 14 South, the elite wing on the new penthouse floor of NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital. Pampering and décor to rival a grand hotel, if not a Downton Abbey, have long been the hallmark of such amenities units, often hidden behind closed doors at New Yorks premier hospitals. But the phenomenon is escalating here and around the country, health care design specialists say, part of an international competition for wealthy patients willing to pay extra, even as the federal government cuts back hospital reimbursement in pursuit of a more universal and affordable American medical system.
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A waterfall, a grand piano and the image of a giant orchid grace the soaring ninth floor atrium of McKeen, leading to refurbished rooms that, like those in the hospitals East 68th Street penthouse, cost patients $1,000 to $1,500 a day, and can be combined. That fee is on top of whatever base rate insurance pays to the hospital, or the roughly $4,500 a day that foreigners are charged, according to the hospitals international services department.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/nyregion/chefs-butlers-and-marble-baths-not-your-average-hospital-room.html?_r=1&hpw
Warpy
(111,255 posts)but the people in them were just as sick as the people in the other wards, so sick that most of them were unaware of the frippery.
I know when I've been stuck in the hospital, it's been a case of patch me up and send me home or kill me quickly, I don't care which.
hedgehog
(36,286 posts)cbayer
(146,218 posts)foreign nationals or the very rich from other countries.
I remember when the Shah of Iran was there in 1979. What an ordeal. IIRC, he had a full floor to himself and the logistics of doing all the routine things was a nightmare.
But I bet they were paid very, very well.
Heddi
(18,312 posts)Our patients have frozen dinners to eat after the cafeteria is closed and packets of Sanka as a stand-in for coffee. We're constantly running short of supplies, and there's a nationwide shortage of IV Valium right now (thank goodness it's not a shortage of more critically-needed IV Meds, like Nicardipine or Propofol, etc, which there have been shortages of).
We don't have enough beds for all the people that we admit, and because we're a trauma center, we get like 6,000 transfers from other hospitals a year. We board people in the ER for days at a time. There are no pillows in the ER because we just don't have enough of them..
People get sick of the wait, get sick of being boarded in a hallway on a gurney and leave.
And these folks get rooms with a sofa.
EvolveOrConvolve
(6,452 posts)If there were a national health plan, I wouldn't have so much of a problem with the "Palace Medicine". As it is, though, it's just obscene.
silverweb
(16,402 posts)[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]Any culture that permits such over-the-top opulence for the wealthy alongside lack of access to the basics for others is corrupt.
Some things should just not be for profit -- and adequate universal health care is at the very top of that list.
Then the rich paying extra for their luxuries will not be considered so obscene.