Back in the good old days of Ellis Island, immigrants who were ill were sent home, as were those with no sponsors. That’s when we were “a nation of immigrants” instead of a squatting zone for sick, unemployed, illegal riff-raff from around the world.
Wait a minute, people.
The issue is not medical care. It is emergency medical care. Hospitals are not permitted to examine whether or not an individual is insured when providing emergency care. Such an examination would compromise the quality of that care and kill people, some of whom may be fully insured and citizens.
The issue here is “emergency”. The federal government, the Bush Administration, is saying chemotherapy for cancer does not constitute an emergency.
That is a fuzzy call. It is certainly correct in many instances. The chemo schedule for something like prostate cancer, that moves slowly, probably is not so urgent as to be called an emergency. Other instances where chemo now can kill enough cells to prevent spread . . . maybe. I would suspect that is rare.
Regardless, the point here is hospitals must provide emergency care to people without any research into their ability to pay because in an emergency taking time to do that research could kill the patient. Hard to describe chemo as falling under that category.