“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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