Why It Can Be So Hard for Single People to Get the Medical Care They Need

Need someone to drive you to a medical procedure or stay with you? What if you don’t have anyone, or don’t want to ask the people you do have?

If you are single and you need to have a simple outpatient procedure performed at a hospital, you may think that it is no big deal. You can just call a cab when you are ready to leave and sleep off any grogginess at home.

Untold numbers of single people have discovered that it is not so simple at all. As Professor Cathy Goodwin explained in an article she wrote in 2016:

By federal law, patients who are cognitively impaired after anesthesia must be discharged to a “responsible” adult. In their zeal for liability protection, hospitals have escalated these requirements to include patients who are ambulatory and alert when they’re discharged. They’ve also tightened the requirements for what counts as a “responsible adult.”

At the Community of Single People (CoSP) we have discussed, in several extensive threads, the ways in which hospitals make it hard for single people to get the care they need. One thread began with a posting by a single woman who went to a hospital for an outpatient procedure, only to be told that she was not allowed to take public transportation home nor call a cab. Some hospitals require the person fetching you to sign a form saying that they will stay with you for a prolonged period of time.

If you can’t take a cab or any public transportation, and you may also need to have someone with you to agree in writing that they will stay with you for hours, that can be a problem for people who are single. Hospital policies sometimes seem insensitive to that problem.

Even If You Have People Who Would Help, You May Not Want to Ask Them

I have often made the case, based on scientific research, that single people often have more friends than married people do, and are in many ways even more connected to neighbors, friends, siblings, and parents than people who get married. And now here I am saying that hospitals should not just assume that all patients can find a friend or relative to drive them home and maybe stay with them afterwards as well.