Tuesday, July 10, 2007
A tragic lesson: Health care must be fixed

It might be an exaggeration to say the nation's health-care system -
or lack thereof - killed Sandra Pearson. But it sure didn't do much to
keep her from dying.

Pearson, who lived in the Town of Poughkeepsie, died June 30 - about
five months after she was diagnosed with a rare illness that had
destroyed part of her intestines.

Pearson - everybody called her Sandy - lived for 52 years, and she
had full-time jobs for 35 of those years. She had a medical insurance
policy through her employer, A&P Supermarkets, but it wasn't long
after her illness was diagnosed that she learned it was virtually
worthless.

The policy contained a raft of exclusions and thresholds and caveats,
and the bottom line was this: Before she could undergo surgery
involving a transplant of some of her intestines, she would have to
qualify for Medicaid. And in order to qualify for Medicaid, she would
have to give the state Medicaid system her life's savings.

The red tape involved in applying and getting approved for Medicaid
was about as arduous and complicated as you'd expect, but with the
help of a social worker at Vassar Brothers Medical Center, Pearson
finally did so three months ago.

The social worker, May Mamiya, called Pearson's case a textbook
example of what's wrong with the nation's health-care system: Here was
a woman had who worked and paid taxes all her life and had a job that
included medical insurance. But when she needed help - for the first
time in her life - the system failed her miserably.

All the delays in dealing with her insurance carrier, and then
Medicaid, pushed Pearson farther down the waiting list for a donor for
the transplant operation.

And on June 30, she ran out of time.
http://poughkeepsiejournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070710/COLUMNISTS/70
7100319

"Three months ago a homeless seventh grader in Prince George's County,
Maryland, died because his mother could not find a dentist who would
do an $80 tooth extraction. Deamonte Driver, 12, eventually was given
medicine at a hospital emergency room for headaches, sinusitis and a
dental abscess.

The child was sent home, but his distress only grew. It turned out
that bacteria from the abscessed tooth had spread to his brain. A pair
of operations and eight subsequent weeks of treatment, which cost more
than a quarter of a million dollars, could not save him. He died on
Feb. 25.
...
That an American child could die because his mother couldn't afford to
have a diseased tooth extracted sounds like a horror story from some
rural outpost in the Great Depression. It's the kind of gruesomely
tragic absurdity you'd expect from Faulkner. But these things are
happening now.

''People don't understand the amount of time and stress parents are
going through as they try to get their children the coverage they
need, in many cases just to stay alive,'' said Marian Wright Edelman,
president of the Children's Defense Fund and a tireless advocate of
expanding health coverage to the millions of American children who are
uninsured or underinsured. "
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F40715F93A550C7A8DDDAC08
94DF404482

Oh, I see

You're advocating the use of profit motive to make
health care "better"

And how much longer do you think she would have lived
in a system where she wasn't covered?

You're really a dumb f.ck aren't you?