All she needed to do was to go to urgent care. I don't care if the bill was $500. If your car broke down, wouldn't you go get the freaking thing fixed...beg, borrow or steal to have your vehicle back? it's too bad people don't feel their bodies are as important as their damn cars.
They understand their cars better than they understand their bodies.
Thank you for being so understanding.
She didn't know. She thought she had a cold. She didn't go to urgent care because, first of all she couldn't afford to, and secondly, she had a job and thus unless she lied about that, they would have charged her full pop. She was more or less a minimum wage earner and had not worked long enough at her new job to "qualify" for the company health plan (something she would not have to do under the Schwartzenegger plan).
She tried to treat this thing honestly by getting over the counter medication and not going to the emergency room under an assumed name. But, even if she had gone to the doctor, and they discovered her pneumonia, that would not have solved her dilemma. If the doctors had caught it, it would have bankrupted her family because they would have had to hospitalize her for a couple of weeks. Instead she kept on working until the pneumonia got so bad her heart stopped.
Maybe her family should be glad that she didn't burden them with a big hospital bill and instead was thoughtful enough to just drop dead and save everyone a lot of money.
Is health care a right or a privilege? If its a right, then it should be available in some sort of rational, cost effective manor. If its a privilege, then we have to accept that people who can not afford the privilege are going to die, and move on.