This is just sickening. I feel like making up pamphlets and handing them out whenever some dimwit whips out the old zombie lie about how “we have the best healthcare system” in the world:
The 24-year-old nephew of musician Bootsy Collins has died at the University Hospital in Cincinnati after a tooth infection spread to his brain. Kyle Willis, an unemployed single father of a 6-year-old girl, first went to a hospital complaining of a painful toothache two weeks ago. Willis had no health insurance and couldn’t afford the $27 antibiotic he was prescribed.
No one should ever die in the United States of America for lack of mainstream antibiotics. They’ve been around for almost one-hundred years and cost pennies a dose to produce. If any one reading this ever ends up in the same boat, I will find you $27 to get a script like that filled.
Free at the point of care. What is so hard about that. Yes pay for non urgent medication but go to hospital and care should be free (included in taxes that you Americans are so unhappy to pay).
This is very common in the world of people who have autoimmune diseases. I have a combination of Lupus, Sjogren’s (Like Venus W.), RA, Psoriatic Arthritis, Meniere’s and Spasmodic Dysphonia. I’m lucky and I have fairly decent insurance through my husband’ employer.
I know of many others with these diseases who have to choose between food and their life-saving meds each and every month.
I have a friend in Texas who has Lupus. She lost her job and insurance as a highly paid legal secretary because of her health issues. She and her teen-aged daughter were reduced to living on $300/month child support from her ex. She had to apply and appeal three times before she was accepted by disability and has to wait two years until Medicare kicks in.
Recently, her daughter panicked when Mom was having chest pains and a seizure and took her to the nearest (private) hospital. The cardiologist had a list of tests that he wanted to run, but when she explained her situation, he told her that she needed to leave and go to the county hosp. “Where they deal with your kind”.
I’ve been following two other cases. One friend has Sjogren’s and lives in PA. Another friend lives in Australia and has been diagnosed with Lupus and possibly other AI diseases. They have similar symptoms, such as extreme weight loss, severe muscle loss and pain and other symptoms.
The man in PA has been brushed off or ignored by the doctors and hospitals, especially once it was learned that his COBRA insurance will soon expire. The lady in Australia was hospitalized for three solid weeks, while she was being pumped full of nutrients so that she would gain weight. The doctors ran every test that they could think of to try to pin down what is causing her symptoms. She will be hospitalized again once the test results are analyzed and her doctors decide on a treatment plan.
I’ve become convinced that our healthcare system is far from “the best”. I would much rather live where there is universal healthcare like the system that Linda has in Australia.
Apart from high-tech, high-cost, rich-and-well-insured-only-need-apply care the States continually appears low on all international surveys of health and medicine.
Disgusting is not a strong enough word for it.
deja vu…this has happened many times before as well.
2007 in Maryland – http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Dental/story?id=2925584&page=1
No real progress since then. The health care bill was so heavily gutted, the insurance companies even approved it.
Here is evidence as to why they approved it.
The most disgusting thing of all is that heads of the insurance companies actually sleep comfortably at night knowing full well that cases like this don’t need to happen if they weren’t a profit driven industry…
I have an autoimmune condition called Anlyosing spondalitis, the best medication to control it is Humira. With good insurance, which I have right now, it’s still a pain in the ass to get approved but it’s way affordable. Without insurance it could cost over $500 a dose, you take two a month. Even if you qualify for free Humira, which is reasonably easy to do, you still have to see a rheumy and have several ongoing tests which isn’t cheap.
I have learned a political lesson: When you get majorities you run the fucking table, implement as many of your ideas and let them sink or swim on the merits.
At least he didn’t have government bureaucrats making decisions about his healthcare…
(full disclosure, I am an American government bureaucrat who makes decisions about healthcare and who believes everyone should have access to healthcare)
Yeah, our healthcare in Australia isn’t perfect, but I’ve grown to love it ever so much from hearing about the US. And we do have almost the best life expectancy in the world, as long as you aren’t an Aboriginal person. We plummet to third world standards there.
What I can’t fathom is why the USAns ever linked health care to employment! If you get too sick to work you are so screwed…
Best medicine in the world (arguably). Worst healthcare in the First World (undeniable, though the US can take pride in beating out some Third World nations).
Welcome to my world.
Two years ago, the abcessed molar I’d been barely controlling finally went haywire. I’ll spare you the details, but it was the worst night of my life.
The next morning (good thing it wasn’t Sunday) I went to the county dental clinic. It only took four hours to get in and stand in a hallway while a dentist shined a penlight in my mouth for five seconds. My reward was a free bottle of antibiotics and a prescription for Vicodin, which was bought for me by my ex-wife.
Of course the tooth wasn’t pulled. Why should it be? Working-class people don’t get THAT kind of care; then EVERYBODY would just quit their job and be lazy, I guess.
Months later, I had to skip out on work and drop $200+ at a for-profit clinic.
Then the county sent me a bill for another $100.
I suppose I have only myself to blame, since I didn’t get a job doing something which benefits society – like banking or managing a hedge fund. I’m only an emergency medical technician.
Who says my son and I need health care? I guess it’s just the price we pay to escape the fate of those commie loser countries like Canada. And Australia. And France, the UK, Italy, Japan. . . etc
The United States healthcare system is certainly not the best in the world. In fact, it is the most inefficient; health outcomes are pretty mediocre for a wealthy, developed country, while expenditure per capita is the highest in the world. Check out World Health Organisation publications for more info (World Health Report 2000, World Health Statistics 2005-2011).
On another note, prescribing antibiotics for a toothache is an exercise in futility; the prescribing physician is guilty of gross negligence if that was the extent of his/her treatment plan. If you have an infected tooth, you have two options: get a root canal treatment (expensive) or have the tooth extracted. This man should have seen a dentist.
I am still a US citizen, but I live in Ecuador, which some would call a third world country. I had an accident here and needed an x-ray. I went into a clean hospital within (painful) walking distance from my home, and did not have to wait more than an hour to get the x-ray. When it was done, and a doctor had interpreted it, I asked “Where do I pay? How much?” (in Spanish of course). He just laughed and said “we are on the road to free health care here”. No one would accept payment. Not even for the cost of materials.
It’s not free of course, it is funded by sales taxes and oil money. But it was refreshing and surprising. None of that “ah, but you are an alien, go die somewhere” like in the US.
I have MS and Grave’s Disease.
The combination is going to kill me, the damage to my heart from the Graves’ Disease will eventually make my heart collapse, but I can’t afford all the meds I need to take. I can’t afford the exams and blood work. I can’t afford the treatments. I can’t afford the MRIs.
Nothing.
I endure. That’s all I do.
And here’s the kicker: My husband works. We have insurance. But no clinic or hospitals honor the co-pays anymore. You have to pay out of pocket and then spend all of your life haranguing the insurance company to reimburse you for what they’re supposed to do for you.
I am so sick of Blue Cross, I could fucking scream, but it’s the only insurance my husband’s company does business with.
Disability? SSI? GIve me a break! Qualifying for anything has proved insane because doctors charge now for paperwork to be filled out, and–you guessed it–I can’t afford the fees for that, either.
I’m out of my ever-loving mind from all this.
Back in college, when I was laying on the floor crying from the pain of a kidney stone, my roommate took me to the hospital over my protests. I honestly thought they wouldn’t let me in because I was poor and couldn’t pay. They did let me in. They did emergency surgery to install a stent and broke up the stone. I don’t remember any followup instructions; at least nobody called or sent me anything.
Fast forward 15 years later, after multiple bouts of suspicious back pain, fever, rounds of increasingly serious antibiotics, and getting-through-it-the-best-I-could while working a series of low-level office job. Finally had insurance. Woke up with chills and night sweats and pain for five nights before I figured it was bad enough to risk the financial drain of going back to the hospital. Had to pay hundreds of dollars deductible up front for my radiology work; didn’t have the money. Cried in my doctor’s office.
Took me a week, still with symptoms, to get the money to pay my deductible so I could get the images. The nephrologist called me “stupid” for not getting the stent taken out; it had filled with stone material and blocked my kidney so that it literally exploded from infection. I dragged myself to the hospital to schedule surgery. The first place I was taken was the office to talk about payment. They totaled up the cost of care and told me to pay all my expected copays up front, a matter of a few thousand dollars. It might as well have been a few million. Finally they agreed to accept a reduced amount of a few hundred dollars then and the rest “later”. I wrote a check I knew would bounce. They took my check and called my bank to see if I had the funds, which of course I didn’t. So they graciously accepted whatever I did have at the moment.
“Later” came the morning of surgery, when I checked in at the desk and they said, “we have a note here that says you need to pay the balance of your co-pays before we can let you start surgery.” Exhausted and in pain, I’m not sure I remember exactly how it worked out that the money got raised. I know a couple of friends pawned stuff. I had to reschedule surgery anyway because it took me all day to arrange to get the money.
In the hospital, after the surgery (which landed me in intensive care for three days), while I was still unable to walk unaided and was on narcotics, the hospital sent a woman from accounting to my room with a stack of financial responsibility paperwork to sign. I knew I wasn’t in any shape to competently sign anything, and I told her so. She said, “I’m not going anywhere until you sign these forms.” I said, “Suit yourself” and I closed my eyes and went to sleep. When I woke up, there was a note on my bed table saying I must call her as soon as I woke up. The word “must” was underlined twice, so hard the pen point went through the paper.
When a friend came to pick me up from the hospital, the nurse told me they were going to send me a home care nurse for a couple of weeks. I could walk a few feet so I thought I would be OK without the extra cost on top of everything else. I got home and sat in my recliner, and then realized I could not get out of the chair without help. I finally broke down and called the hospital and told them I needed the nurse after all. When the nurse came, she told me I was supposed to pay her up front for the supplies she was expected to need.
Insurance paid their portion of the charges, and then the hospital and nurse services billed me for more charges that the insurance considered unnecessary. I asked for a copy of the itemized bill so I could go over each line item and see what was up, because I knew from talking to the insurance company that they had attempted to bill me for services I didn’t actually receive. The hospital refused to send me one, but many of the charges mysteriously disappeared. They call me a lot. I tell them I’m not paying them a dime until I get the itemized bill, which they continually refuse to provide me.
Honestly, I’m not sure how I’m alive today.
I wish I had something non-hackneyed to say to the people in this thread.
I don’t, at least not now. This is the best I can do.
Hang in there. Fight and sacrifice to get the treatment you need and deserve.
The USA, the only rich nation where health care workers can live without access to health care.
Where people with money can be provided care they don’t need.
And those without enough money can fuck off and die.
I am a nurse and have worked in managed care and want to beat every fool who goes on about how great our system is.