Posted on 09/13/2017 3:25:05 PM PDT by Ennis85
Sarai was 25 years old when she died of Wilson’s disease, an inherited disorder that causes liver failure. A liver transplant could have cured her, but she was uninsured and was denied an appointment at two prominent Chicago transplant hospitals, including my own. Sarai’s plight was brought to my attention when a local religious group held a hunger strike advocating transplant access for Sarai and other uninsured patients. When she died, her congregation marched seven miles, holding her photograph and lugging coffins emblazoned with her name, to launch a sit-in in front of Northwestern University Hospital. Her death certificate named liver disease as her cause of death, but that’s not true. The real cause was inequality. If the United States had a Medicare-for-all health insurance system, she might have been saved.
In nearly 40 years as a doctor, I witnessed time and again how inequality kills. Those without health insurance, such as Sarai (there are almost 30 million in the country), often cannot access the most basic care, let alone complex specialty care. But the problem is more serious than a simple lack of health insurance. What insurance card you hold can literally be a matter of life and death.
Consider how our current multi-payer health insurance system affects hospitals, clinics and patients. I have practiced at three hospitals along a two-mile strip of Ogden Avenue in Chicago. I spent 17 years at Cook County Hospital, now the John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County, rising from intern to chief of general medicine. When I practiced at Cook County Hospital, it was largely a hospital for the uninsured. Despite many improvements, largely because of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, many services, such as screening colonoscopies and hip replacements, are still beyond reach for patients and their doctors.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
How come you didn’t volunteer your time to save them?
Hypocrite capitalist!
We have watched patients die from waiting in line till it’s too late and curable cancer, such as colon cancer, has metastasized in single payer Merry Olde England for decades. And we’ve seen people wait years for a hip replacement, waiting to the point that they can’ walk anymore, and finally coming here for the surgery and pay 20k themselves. . It’s never time for single-payer here.
The left’s specialty is Policy By Anecdote. The concept is invalid, of course, but this particular example is a poor one indeed. There just aren’t that many livers to go around, regardless of whether the all-providing State is the only one in a position to write a check or you could find one on craigslist.
“Don’t take poverty away from poor folks.
Good lord, man, it’s all they have!”
-—Brother Dave
He doesn’t mention the fact that Sarai was an illegal alien. I’m not sure that any universal health care system in America would be able to cover every poor person in the entire world, but that is a reasonable extension of the argument he is making.
The good doctor just wants to get paid.
I guess that this MD never heard of Obamacare-——that saved all of the poor.
.
If I could get everybody else working
for me for free, that’d be great.
The department *I* worked in treated all three groups during the day shift and people from "da hood" at all other times.
Never,in those 25 years,did I see anyone die of poverty.
Never!
Lies. Just lies. You want to see people die without care? Try England. Canada.
IOW,just as Congress is now exempt from ObamaCare this clown (and his fellow doctors) will only support a "single payer" plan that exempts *them*.
Doctors who have a brain understand government run health care is an abomination.
They understand.
yep, tons of money will keep you alive forever, just ask Steve Jobs
..
oh wait, he’s DEAD !
If Steve Jobs didn’t have enough money to live, yep, neither do you!
boo hoo your mortal!
The sort of operation Sarai needed is the sort of thing that will become quite unavailable to people not members of the ruling oligarchy. In a free market system of medicine that has no government interference there is a pretty good chance that such a malady will receive the attention of a charity. Charities abound in free market systems. In a semi free system the government can sometimes be induced to provide that charity. In a totally government system there is no charity, only a perverted cost/benefit calculation. i.e. if she gets the operation will she then be able to function well enough to pay taxes that in the rest of her life will more than equal the government expense?
“Waiting in line” is a deliberate tactic to reduce medical costs in Britain and now in Canada and is beginning to appear in Obamacare. It has worked wonderfully well in the VA system which is what Bernie wants to bring to all of us.
You bring back memories of the funniest records that were ever made.
With Amnesty or just amnesty-by-neglect firmly in place this country would become rapidly the destination of last, then first resort for all the world’s poor and not so poor when we get Single Payer unless our Progressive caring Socialists shut off non citizens altogether.
These might trigger some more memories -—
“James Lewis, get away from that wheelbarrow. You know you doesn’t know nothin’ ‘bout machinery!”
“liver transplant could have cured her”
It isn’t just the cost of the transplant...but the lifetime costs of the antirejection meds, the steroids, the hospitalizations needed when the immune suppressants allow infections, particularly fungal infections to take root that really make transplants very expensive. The 3 year mortality rates are 22 per cent(survival rate is 78 per cent)! Survival rates out to 18 years post is up to 60 per cent...though folks getting out to beyond 10 before dying may have succommed to other causes. For Example, a 50 something liver transplant patient may die of cardiac issues before reaching his 18th survival year, not related to his transplant. So the 40 per cent mortality rate by the 18th year may have to be viewed with a grain of salt.
The point is, Transplantations are very costly with the total lifetime costs being many times the actual cost of the transplant. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be done but they need to find ways of bringing down the total costs or else only the very rich can pay for them. That’s why I view organ donation very cynically...oh give “the gift of life” the advertisements urge, do it “for free!”, only the doctors and hospitals will profit handsomely from some brain dead suckers “free liver” while his widow gets nothing but the lingering hospital bills.
I think a movement needs to be started serving notice that the families of organ donators get promised a percentage of the gross profits that will be made on the transplantation of their loved ones’ organs or else no donations will be made. Offering a profit incentive may do better to increase the supply than advertisements that play on guilt...especially since most of the organs will go to those with the best insurance or have the means to pay for them. A threat to boycott organ donations (or a well publicized movement aimed to reduce organ supply until a system is in place to make sure that all who need an organ can get one regardless of the ability to pay) will get the elites’ attention.
Families of organ donators need to be paid since it is the rich or well to do who mostly get the best chance at getting organs anyway. None of this “guilt” stuff!...pay the families of organ donators or ban all transplants!
The technology really has never been ready for ‘prime time” anyway. Stem Cell research with one’s own healthy organs grown from them looks promising but by the time that such organs would be ‘ready” one may have already died.
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