‘Patient dumping’ results in lawsuit against Nev.
By Laila Kearney, Reuters
SAN FRANCISCO – The city of San Francisco is suing the state of Nevada for busing patients, many of them indigent and mentally ill, from a public hospital in Las Vegas to the Bay Area without plans for continued care.
The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in San Francisco Superior Court, seeks $500,000 in reimbursement of public funds claimed to have been used to care for the out-of-state patients as well an injunction barring Nevada from dumping more patients in California in the future.
“Homeless, psychiatric patients are especially vulnerable to the kind of practices Nevada engaged in, and the lawsuit I’ve filed today is about more than just compensation. It’s about accountability,” San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said in a statement about the lawsuit, filed as a class action but not yet certified as such by the court.
The state-run Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas came under fire in April, after the Sacramento Bee reported that hospital staff had given as many as 1,500 patients one-way bus tickets to California and 46 other states between 2008 and 2013.
The sad thing about this story is that 75% of Nevadans would react to this with two words: So what? And many of those would view it as payback on California for being (in their view) the cause of all of Nevada’s problems.