It’s 7.30am at Chris Hani-Baragwanath Hospital, and desperation hangs thickly in the air. 
The Citizen has linked up with the Gauteng Legislature’s Jack Bloom for a tour of three hospitals, and we’re working our way through a mass of huddled humanity.
Bizarrely, some people seem to have left the queue in which they had been waiting for a stamp.
This stamp allows them to join another queue for a number.
When their number is called out, they are allowed to join a queue somewhere else – if there’s time.
Evidently, the numbers can run into the 900s. Pensioner Abrem Makhoana, 77, patiently endures this rigmarole at least once a month to get his prescription medication.
He’s been here since 5am and has finally received a number: 138. TM Milanze has had the same experience, and usually has to take two days off work.
Only one pharmacist was available to dispense medication, so it can take six hours to see a doctor.
Bloom says that at other hospitals patients struggle even more.
At the Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital, some people had begun queuing as early as 1am.
When Bloom arrived at 6am they had still not been attended to. Bloom said the situation at the Helen Joseph Memorial Hospital seemed to have improved greatly since his visit two months before.
The hospital now sports a new pharmacy section with five cubicles. At the old section, however, several patients complained bitterly about the hospital’s Byzantine filing system and rude staff.
It was now almost 11.30am, and one man who didn’t have R35 to open a file had been waiting for help since 5am while others slipped in ahead of him.
“You can die here in this queue!” shouted one woman angrily.
“If you don’t have money, they treat you like dirt – what must we poor people do if we’re sick?”
Bloom is compiling a report on 25 major provincial hospitals, and will be presenting the findings – along with the DA’s suggestions on how to shorten queues – to health MEC Brian Hlongwa later this week.
These include computerised filing and outsourcing chronic medicine distribution to local pharmacies.
DA wil Franz Jooste se ‘haatkamp’ gesluit hê
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[image: Franz Jooste]‘n Mosie om die Afrikaneroorlewingsgroep, die
Kommandokorps, se “haatkamp” gesluit te kry, is Dinsdag deur die
provinsiale wetgewer ...
26 minutes ago
4 Opinion(s):
And yet most of those patients being treated like worthless cattle will be casting a vote for the ANC regime that allowed the hospitals to decay to this extent. There's no winning.
Doberman, something completely different:
I heard today that Jackie Pretorius (former racing car driver) died recently after being in a coma for weeks.
He was attacked in his home. His wife died in a similar incident in the same house several years earlier.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Pretorius
http://www.motorsport.co.za/msa/newsview.asp?ID=3725
Welcome to the Turd World 'ma china'. This is simply the most felt manifestation of the arrogance of the ignorant at work.
The other signs are all around us, crime, grime, crumbling infrastructure, overgrown verges, politicians who flout or change laws to suit, draconian gun control, etc. etc. etc. Pick a number, the list is endless.
I lay the blame for this squarly at the feet of the ANC gubbermunt, who could not organise a piss-up in a brewery, yet shove the people with skills and experience out of the country in the name of 'redress and equality.
What a load of bollocks!
And the beauty of the system for the ANC is this; The dumb f#@ks who voted them into power will continue to vote them into power ad nauseam because they handed them the little they have on the back of other peoples efforts.
Unfortunately they are also driving the people that pay for their largess out of the country and sooner or later the socialist Utopian dream will come crashing down in a way that will make the Zimbabwe fiasco look like a nursery school teachers picnic.
I say stuff them, if they're dumb enough to vote for the ANC then they're dumb enough to die waiting for a doctor.
Sic Vis Pacem, Para Bellum!
Yep Para..
"It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights – the "right" to education, the "right" to health care, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery – hay and a barn for human cattle." ~ Alexis De Tocquiville
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