The set up and the question (boldface mine):
But my sister’s grandchild, the “apple of her eye”, just died. She was ten. All of ten years old.
She had the flu, you see. The doctor wasn’t concerned. And since her Mom and Dad had no insurance, she was just another one of those Pains In the Butt. Go home, Kid, and lump it. A couple of days later, Mom and Dad were really getting worried. She was blue around her mouth and nose. She said she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t pee, either.
The second doctor that saw her said it was the “worst kidney infection he’d ever seen”. Gave her some antibiotic samples and sent her home. That was just yesterday, at 3:30. She died today just after noon, with a helicopter trying to get there in time and a young doctor in the ER doing everything he could think of for a little girl that told him, “I trust you. I see in your eyes you’re a good person. You will help me”. Lexy’s heart stopped, and this young man threw all his training, all his will, into making that heart start up again. He cried, he sobbed, while he shouted orders and pitted all he was against the forces arrayed against him. In anguish he cried out, “Why the HELL didn’t he KEEP HER IN THE HOSPITAL”??, referring to the second physician to see her, with her blue nails and mouth.
The answer:
Lexy’s Mom and Dad didn’t have health insurance, even though they both work. Until we live in a world where a child gets the treatment she needs, we live in a world where horror lurks.
No civilized country should ever let this happen. Ever. Instead of condolences for the dearly departed, we should be offering healthcare to every adult and every child, regardless of income. If all of Western Europe can do this, why can’t we?
No nation can consider itself to be great if it lets this happen. No patriot lets a ten-year child die for money. No ideology worth a damn countenances such a horrible thing.
mikethemadbiologist
Agreed.
Instead of “obamacare” they should have pushed “Medicaid for ALL”.
Too late now, that door has slammed shut. And low-income people dying of preventable diseases will be the inevitable result. for the foreseeable future…as will be the bloated profits of the insurance industry.
The Health Insurance lobbied against any government insurance Martin.. DON’T YOU REMEMBER!! I lost friends working for health Insurance because I worked so hard to help us get Health Reform….YOU simply want to take a sad opportunity like this one and blame our compassionate and decent President! We were lucky to get Health Reform at a time like that with the GREED that went on and Health Insurance Corporations, like they said, Blue Cross paying big sums against us! Health Reform is a foot in the door and will cover many but the President is not stopping at that! Yes, why didn’t they keep that child in the hospital…because people want more money than the government can afford and after all who cares about the middle class …NOT Tea Party /Republicans!
It literally sickens me that people claim they want to live in a world like this.
A world where kids die because mommy and daddy’s bosses gypped them out of health insurance, and didn’t pay them enough to get it on their own.
A world where the only way to make a living in many parts of the country is to foul the air, water, and soil with coal, and risk your life doing it.
A world where workers work harder and harder so money can sit idle in the vaults of the ultra rich.
If this is the world they want, let them have it. I probably only have to put up with it for another 20 year or so anyway. And I hope there’s no reincarnation.
What sickens me more, John, is that people blithely pine about bringing more innocent lives into this cesspit. ‘Nuther lamb for the slaughter, anyone? This long ago ceased to be a place where opportunity and hard work pay, and the “me” generation that lit their afterburners on the cynical culture of the ’80s are now settling into a nice retirement in politics. The doctor should have been hamstrung, and the hospital administrators who care more for profit than the Hippocratic Oath deserve to have their names published. But that’s just me, and I’m a spiteful bastard when it comes to many things, but as a child abuse survivor, I’m particularly homicidal when it comes to kids
This is the fundamental principle of libertarianism: Money is more important than anything else, even lives.
This sort of thing is why I am less and less inclined to consider us a civilized nation. When kids have to die to satisfy some ideological point, we’ve missed something important.
I heard the Tea-Partiers at last night’s debate did call out for people to die if they could not afford the healthcare.
Got news for ’em Keith: No animal alive will simply lay down and die. If enough people can’t afford medicine, for whatever reason, and whether any of us agree or not, they will simply take it. No human is so civilized that civility won’t take a back seat to survival. The TP-er’s are out of touch with their own survival instincts if they think otherwise
Stories like this break my heart. I’m one of those “government bureaucrats making decisions about healthcare” for my state’s Medicaid program. Every day, I think about whether or not specific health care services should be covered for the people we serve. If I do my job well, people get the care they need, providers receive payment in a timely manner, and we do not pay for excessive services. We do our best to cover services that are the community standard of care so that the people we serve receive care that is comparable to other members of our community. And lately there are almost constant complaints about freeloaders getting Cadillac care AND about government bureaucrats keeping people from getting care. The truth is EVERYONE should have access to Cadillac care.
I live in Britain and grew up with the NHS. it boggled my mind when I found out other countries, especially the US which is supposed to be the land of freedom and prosperity, didn’t have an NHS. that the richest nation in the world thinks healthcare isn’t a universal right still boggles me. and that the richest people in the richest country have the audacity to say that free healthcare is irresponsible sickens me.
I posted this on Facebook with the caption “Libertarians, please read.” I know some people, including a former boyfriend who is a fundamentally good and decent person in his personal life, who have bought into libertarian ideology. It scares me to see so many people buying into ideas whose logical consequences are egregiously evil.
So that would seem to throw yet another spin on the Ron Paul question:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/everything-you-need-to-know-about-gop.html
What if it’s a kid? Is the kid stupid because (s)he didn’t sign up for insurance when his/her parents couldn’t afford it?
Sins of the father I guess.
Why the #@%& do we bother to be a country if we won’t take care of our kids with the resources we share. If it turns out that everyone is on his own, it’s going to get ugly.
The blue nails and mouth are referred to as cyanosis, and the 2nd doctor knew damn well what it meant, because you start hearing it in public high school biology courses. He just couldn’t be bothered explaining to the Mc-MBA who ran the joint why he wasted the time of paying clients on a case that didn’t contribute to the bottom line. You can disagree as vehemently as you want, you are still wrong.