Saturday, October 13, 2012

13 October 2012 “Best care anywhere”






“Speaking to a paper called The Dispatch at a campaign stop in Ohio, Romney doubled down on his insistence that he’ll repeal Obamacare, using the logic that everything is already fine just as it is:

                “We don’t have a setting across this country where if you don’t have insurance, we just say to you, ‘Tough luck, you’re going to die when you have your heart attack.’
                No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it’s paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital. We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.””

          Only a complete disconnect from the American health care delivery team can generate such a misinformed statement at that issued by Mr. Romney. 
          I have spent many long hours working along other health care professionals to resuscitate patients brought to an ER DOA.  The incidence of such patients’ demise is directly proportional to the patient’s economic status. 
          Romney is correct in asserting that the indigent and merely poor can obtain medical care by going to a hospital ER.  That is, “IF” that patient has insurance, or the proper insurance.
           Many hospitals, particularly corporate chain owned will not accept patients without approved insurance.  Such patients can legally be provided only the most minimal treatment and then turfed to another facility that is designated for the care of indigent patients.  Of course, the patient might never survive the triage process in place at a particular ER, might never survive the transfer to another ER. 
          The truth of the matter is that lack of insurance kills people slowly.  They don’t get the preventive or maintenance care they need because most physicians can’t and/or won’t see such patients in their offices.  If they do, the wait is extended far beyond optimal just to get in the door. 
          Patients die of benign neglect rendered by society.  They die in homeless shelters of chronic diseases that wealthy people are cured of in routine appointments.  They die because they can’t afford medication that wealthy patients buy without thinking twice.  They die at home because they skip nutrition in order to buy medications.  They die of infections that are easily treated if only they could see a physician or a nurse practitioner.  They die at home because they have no access to transportation to medical offices, no phones to call an ambulance.  They die because there are many, many more of such Americans, with no insurance and no routine medical care, than our ERs can handle.
          In north east Tennessee there is a service known as RAM that provides charity care to those who can manage to travel to the annual clinic and withstand the overnight wait for an access pass.  It’s highly offensive that these Americans are reduced to begging for charity care, often delivered in stock pens and cattle barns.  For the attendees, it can be the difference between life and death. 
          Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan are without comprehension of the mechanisms of health care delivery to poor and homeless Americans.  When you own the hospital chain, or write the laws that give you access to luxury care at Bethesda, you don’t have to worry about dying in the ER holding area before being seen and treated. 
          Mr. Romney, people die at home because they have no alternative, every day in these United States.  Only someone with a guaranteed income such as yours could be so unable to see that our ERs are already dangerously overloaded and that they are not designed to provide routine care to people with no place else to go. 
          In the unfortunate possibility that you should win election, on your first day in office. Please have your head removed from your ass.

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