Posted on 10/15/2014 4:06:52 PM PDT by Kid Shelleen
Josephus Weeks, nephew of Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan, said his uncle died a needless death.
"He was a man of color with no health insurance and no means to pay for treatment, so within hours he was released," Weeks wrote in a Tuesday op-ed for the Dallas Morning News.
Weeks ripped into Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital where his uncle died, saying the medical facility's "ignorance, incompetence and indecency has yet to be explained."
(Excerpt) Read more at nydailynews.com ...
The amount is not as important as the principles. Just like RIAA sued the pants out of any mp3 pirates (eventhough the pirates could barely pay just a fraction), the ebola families need to be sued for causing havoc. The message it will send is: quarantine your infected kin, because even if you survive, you will be in the poorhouse for the rest of your pathetic lives.
For the record, Mr. Weeks is a US Army veteran of the Iraq War.
He could afford an airline flight from west Africa but he couldn’t afford a health insurance policy????too bad.
Then all hell will break loose.
Yup, I can't disagree with that. I have been thinking, since I was just a young Air Force troop in the 70s, that something was dreadfully wrong with the country. Since the information explosion, I see things a lot more clearly, and I am also convinced it will end with a lot of dead people. I know it's off topic, but that's what I think.
Feel free to load up all your nappy-headed kin and GTFO you worthless, ungrateful POS. Africa is waiting on you.
Society held together fairly well during the 2009-2010 depression. Only because the govt was able to use 40% fake money to fund entitlements and make the economy appear better than it was.
This can’t continue indefinitely. However timing is everything and I’ve been wrong for a long time on the forecast.
You are not alone.
I will say some of the uninsured that we treat (and they get exactly the same care as the insured) are some of the most demanding, complaining, ungrateful jerks you will ever meet. Their entitlement and chip on their shoulder is so large they are in danger of not fitting through the door. Never so much as a thank you, just the next demand we can meet for them....
Roger that. Me too. I have been expecting it for 40 years. One of the reasons I stayed in the Air Force, was because I thought, if we were going to have a civil war, that would be about the safest place to be.
Before I had my health insurance, I had gall bladder disease. I would have horrible attacks, for which the hospital would give me a prescription and not much else. I wanted surgery to get the gall bladder removed, but each time, I would just get the prescription and the boot. 24 hours after my insurance kicked in, I had another attack and it was finally bad enough to get surgery. Never had another problem with it.
Other articles indicate otherwise - that the woman’s family (and Duncan) thought it was a miscarriage, and/or thought she had malaria.
"...he didn't mention anything Ebola. He didn’t even mention about any sickness at all."
"Family members said Duncan did not know that he, too, had contracted Ebola before he boarded a flight. When he received the diagnosis, he told Troh, whom he called “the love of his life,” that he regretted bringing the virus to Dallas and possibly exposing her. "
" Smallwood countered speculation that Duncan came to the United State for better treatment for himself since the frail Liberian medical system has been overburdened by the crushing number of Ebola cases. U.S. visas are not granted overnight, he said, noting that Duncan was granted entry because much of his family lives in the United States — North Carolina, Arizona and Texas.
However, that same Star Telegram link has Duncan's last employer, Henry Brunson of SafeWay Cargo, a FedEx affiliate countering:
"Duncan knew he was ill when he flew to Dallas."... “He was very arrogant,” he said. “Every time I gave him instructions, he became confrontational. He didn’t like to follow the rules.”
vs.
Duncan’s arrival in the United States in September was months after he had originally planned.He had hoped to get his visa approved so he could attend his son’s high school graduation in June. By the time his visa was approved in September, the Ebola outbreak in Liberia had exploded.
Duncan arrived at Troh’s apartment in Dallas on September 20 – less than a week after helping carry his sick neighbor. For the nine days before he was taken to a hospital in an ambulance, Duncan shared the apartment with several people including Troh; her other son, Timothy; Duncan’s nephew, Oliver Smallwood; and a family friend, according to Troh’s daughter, Youngor Jallah. “We thought that because he was in America, he was safe, that he would be the one Liberian to survive,” Kwenah said.
Link?
Marie, I spent some time today reading more about T. E. Duncan and the Ebola contacts he had. Here are some highlights.
The neighborhood he lived in was ravaged by Ebola. So many people had died of it that no one would touch or tend to even the very young orphans, for fear of contamination.
Question: did Duncan mention during any of his screening interviews that he lived in a very concentrated Ebola hotspot?
According to on-the-ground reporting of the incident, Duncan and the brother of the pregnant woman, & whoever was helping them, were specifically trying to get her admitted to the Ebola ward of the hospital. Not the pregnancy ward, the Ebola ward. They were turned away because the Ebola ward was full.
Question: Did Duncan mention to anyone, in Liberia, Brussels or the USA, that he had been party to a group, in a taxi, that tried to get a pregnant woman committed to the *Ebola Ward* of the area hospital?
It has been reported that the pregnant woman’s brother, Sonny Boy, died of Ebola before Duncan left the same apartment where Sonny Boy lived. [There are dated, online photos of SB’s dead body, btw.]
Question: Did Duncan mention that he lived in close proximity to a young man who died of Ebola?
Lastly, Liberia had announced plans to prosecute Duncan for lying on his Ebola questionnaire.
Question: who is in a better position to know whether Duncan lied about his Ebola contacts: someone here in the US, or the Liberian authorities who shared a much closer physical proximity to Duncan at the time of his Ebola exposure?
It does appear that after the facts were reported, Duncan back-peddled on whether he knew he’d had contact with a person or persons infected with Ebola. The question is, do you believe the sourced reports that clearly indicate that Duncan both came into very close contact with, and KNEW he came into close contact with, the Ebola virus, or do you believe his subsequent denial? A related question, did he have any reason to deny that he knowingly exposed many, many people to Ebola?
The evidence is compelling. Duncan had much more contact with Ebola than he admitted to. If, for example, *all* he had added to his initial hospital interview was that people in the immediate Monrovian neighborhood in which he lived were dropping like flies of Ebola, he’d have gotten far more attention from the nurses, and almost certainly from the drs also. So even if one grants your insistence that he had no earthly idea the pregnant woman & her brother died of Ebola [despite the fact that their entire neighborhood was devastated by Ebola], he still withheld vital info. Info that likely, sad to say, cost him his life.
I just watched an interview with the neighbors of Duncan. The pregnant woman wasn’t confirmed with Ebola until after he left. The first person to get sick in his neighborhood became ill at the same time that Duncan did and by that time, Duncan was already in the states.
While the reporter was there, an official was making the rounds through the neighborhood trying to get a list of possible contacts. It was after the first man died that people started dropping like flies. By that time, Duncan was already confirmed and in the hospital.
The reporter *specifically* asked if Duncan knew that the pregnant woman had Ebola. The answer was a definitive “No. No one did.”
The vast majority of the articles are speculation written as fact. (Like the rumor that he fled the country to get medical care in the US after being exposed, when he’d been planning this trip for months.)
The fact is that it makes no sense for him to knowingly infect his family.
There are so many rumors that are being taken as gospel truth. People want to blame.
Fine. Then we need to blame the freaking CDC and the Obama administration. They’re the ones who’ve dropped the ball and, in all ways, caused this mess. They are responsible for all of this - including the two sick nurses. And they need to be held accountable. Their ‘don’t panic’ attitude has downplayed the danger to the point where an exposed nurse was free to travel. They should’ve transferred Duncan to Atlanta ASAP, instead they let an ill-equipped, untrained staff deal with it.
“The reporter *specifically* asked if Duncan knew that the pregnant woman had Ebola. The answer was a definitive “No. No one did.””
Malaria is very common in Liberia and reports that I’ve seen say that malaria is what the pregnant woman’s family thought she was suffering from when they carried her to the hospital.
You and I totally disagree on this issue. I believe a lot of whitewashing has been happening since the original facts came out. You believe otherwise. We’ll have to leave it at that.
No, nothing has been confirmed from any hearsay conversation with the duncan family here. Most especially after the *nephew” had his meeting with Jesse Jackson. The news from Liberia and President Sirleaf’s comments that came on the heels of the first Id of Duncan have a much greater probability of being factual about the ebola spread in his family.
Seek out the Liberian web sites for their cooments on this fool and fraud.
His clan has gotten a whiff of money and old Jesse told them how to get it.
They already snagged better housing and probably have been talking to hospital legal reps.
EMTALA imposes 3 distinct legal duties on hospitals. According to the statute, only facilities that participate in Medicare are included, but this encompasses almost 98% of all US hospitals. First, hospitals must perform a medical screening examination (MSE) on any person who comes to the hospital and requests care to determine whether an emergency medical condition (EMC) exists. Second, if an EMC exists, hospital staff must either stabilize that condition to the extent of their ability or transfer the patient to another hospital with the appropriate capabilities. Finally, hospitals with specialized capabilities or facilities (e.g., burn units) are required to accept transfers of patients in need of such specialized services if they have the capacity to treat them.If the hospital determines that no "emergency medical condition" existed, they can toss you out if they choose. I think on the first visit, they were not aware that he definitely had Ebola.
I’ll bet that we can agree that this case proves that our security is lax and that our current efforts will do nothing to protect us from the spread of disease. A person can lie or simply not know and wander right in carrying a Level 4 haphazard.
I’ll bet that we can agree that this administration is displaying criminal negligence with this situation. (And EV-D68) And that the CDC director is an incompetent boob who should be fired immediately.
And I’ll also bet that we agree that it is very clear that we are, in no way, prepared to deal with this.
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