APNewsBreak: South Dakota tribe sues feds over ER closure

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

APNewsBreak: South Dakota tribe sues feds over ER closure

Regina Garcia Cano, Associated Press

Updated 4:50 pm, Thursday, April 28, 2016

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — A Native American tribe in South Dakota sued the federal government Thursday over the nearly five-month closure of the only emergency room on its reservation.

The federal lawsuit filed Thursday by the Rosebud Sioux Tribe asks that federal officials be forced to re-open the emergency room at the hospital administered by the Indian Health Service. The agency shuttered the ER in early December, two weeks after federal inspectors uncovered serious failures that they said put patients' lives at risk.

The lawsuit, which The Associated Press obtained ahead of it being filed, contends that the Indian Health Service — an arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — broke the law because an evaluation of the impact of the closure wasn't submitted to Congress at least a year before it was shutdown, as required by the Indian Health Care Improvement Act.

That evaluation must include several factors, including the quality of health care that would remain after such a closure, as well as the views of the tribe affected. It also requires the government to take into account how far tribal members would have to go to get care.


Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/us/article/APNewsBreak-South-Dakota-tribe-sues-feds-over-ER-7381821.php

[2naSalit]

1. K&R!!!

This is nothing new out in Indian Country. I'm glad they are bringing it to court.

[jtuck004]

2. I bet the bureaucrats that closed it eat better than ANY of the families this clinic served.

I wonder how many people will die while the lawyers play with each other?

"This sprawling Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is a Connecticut-sized zone of prairie and poverty, where the have-nots are defined less by the money they lack than by suffocating hopelessness.

In the national number line of inequality, people here represent the “other 1 percent,” the bottom of the national heap.

Pine Ridge is a poster child of American poverty and of the failures of the reservation system for American Indians in the West. The latest Census Bureau data show that Shannon County here had the lowest per capita income in the entire United States in 2010. Not far behind in that Census Bureau list of poorest counties are several found largely inside other Sioux reservations in South Dakota: Rosebud, Cheyenne River and Crow Creek."
...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/opinion/kristof-povertys-poster-child.html?_r=0

"Statistics often don’t tell the whole story. In the case of the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where I traveled last month to write an article for today’s issue of Inside Stanford Medicine, statistics tell a horrifying story. The average life expectancy among the 9,000 residents of the Lakota Sioux tribe is 47 years for the average male, compared to 77 years nationwide. That’s one year younger than Haiti’s 48. Unemployment rates range from 65-80 percent; diabetes, alcoholism and suicide are at epidemic levels."
...

http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2013/04/22/finding-hope-on-the-rosebud-indian-reservation/

[glinda]

3. I know. This is f)*^)* nuts!

Unreal. It is cruel beyond words.

[LittleGirl]

4. it's been a problem

for years and years...sad

[Judi Lynn]

5. What a shame this information has always been buried by our corporate "news' organizations.

U.S. Americans remain blissfully unaware of it all, not to mention the conditions that led to the current situation, all the centuries of genocide, bloody hatred poured out on the truly defenseless people who had no where to hide from the greedy and murderous, from one coast to the other.

[democrank]

6. "the only emergency room on its reservation" should have mattered to the feds

The plight of Native Americans should make all of us ashamed of our so-called leaders.