Daily Kos: A few anecdotes about medical care in America...
I posted this on DailyKos tonight. Please go read the rest and chime in!
On many levels, I hate to venture into anecdote territory when it comes to health care reform. I don't think it informs the debate in a helpful manner, and yet, it seems to be one of the two major arms of the conservative campaign against health care reform. First, they argue, look how awful it is everywhere else and how wonderful we have it here in America with THE Best Health Care System in the World (TM) and second, they find even Medicare, Social Security and unemployment benefits ideological anathema.Sphere: Related Content
I can't do anything about the second one, but I do have something to
say about the first.
5 comments:
This was excellent -- thanks for putting it together.
I would love to see you even scratch the surface about mental health -- especially in that space between 18-25 when schizophrenia and other bad conditions develop /and/ every young person in America loses their health insurance (if they were lucky enough to get insured in the first place).
Come by and visit my blog, too, if you feel like it: publicoption.blogspot.com.
Thanks for a well written post in the DailyKos. I'm a dinosaur, a boarded family doc doing hospital medicine as well as ob in a rural midwestern community (County size 13,000). I buried one of my 50+ year old patients two months ago because of lack of healthcare. I had taken care of her for her hypertension for years. She got her mammograms during the 'discount month' of October, so they 'only' cost her $150. We had discussed her having her paps done at Planned Parenthood for free, but she didn't because she didn't need birth control. Last summer, she came to see me for pelvic pain. She had a mass in her pelvis. I sent her to the university hospital 45 minutes away, because they wouldn't refuse her care even without insurance. She had metastatic cervical cancer. As other anecedotes have mentioned, she instantly qualified for state aid, and had hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on trying to cure her from an entirely preventable cancer. If she had insurance, I would like to think that at some point in her care, I would have said, Let's just do a pap while you're here. I didn't because Pap cytology is >$100. A pointless death. An insane system. How could physicians NOT want reform?
Thanks, Nick and Lynette,
My experience with mental health issues are limited to the alcoholics, substance abusers and suicide attempts I see on a nearly daily basis in my practice. The younger ones, still on their parents insurance, get treatment, but as you point out, when they get into their 20's that often goes away.
The Kennedy Bill that passed (2008?) is supposed to force mental health insurance parity - we'll see.
Lynette - can you go over to www.drsforamerica.org and put your voice up there with the Voices of Physicians project?
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