APNewsBreak: South Dakota tribe sues feds over ER closure
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
(86,900 posts)This is nothing new out in Indian Country. I'm glad they are bringing it to court.
jtuck004
(15,882 posts)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 dont 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 todays 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. Thats one year younger than Haitis 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
(14,807 posts)Unreal. It is cruel beyond words.
LittleGirl
(8,292 posts)for years and years...sad
Judi Lynn
(160,656 posts)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
(11,112 posts)The plight of Native Americans should make all of us ashamed of our so-called leaders.