Chefs, 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, “I’ll 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 York’s 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 hospital’s 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 hospital’s 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
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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.
