At 10:21 AM Wednesday 5/23/2007, Dan Minette wrote:
> > -----Original Message----- > > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > > Behalf Of jon louis mann > > Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2007 11:04 PM > > To: Killer Bs Discussion > > Subject: U.S. health care > > > > "Why do we behave the way we behave? What has become of us? Where is > > our soul?" > > > > DUMPED ON SKID ROW - Hospitals drop homeless patients on the city's > > Skid Row, sometimes dressed in only a flimsy gown and without a wheel > > chair, even if they're not healthy enough to fend for themselves. > > Anderson Cooper reports on the practice known as "hospital dumping." > >The first thing that comes to mind is that this is an expectable, albeit >immoral, response to the mess that hospitals find themselves in with regard >to treatment of the indigent. > >I have had some extended conversations with my brother-in-law (a physician >who has a low income private practice in Northern Michigan (he sees a lot of >Medicaid patients, and the area is very poor). We agreed that what is >needed is a system in which everyone can get a Chevy, but you have to pay >your own money if you want a BMW. I have heard in recent months on other lists reports of children (sometimes grandchildren or nieces/nephews, etc., of listmembers) who were born with multiple problems which required the baby to stay in the hospital for months after birth during which they had to undergo multiple expensive medical procedures of various sorts and in many cases will require extensive care once they are released from the hospital and will have to go back to the hospital several times for more procedures and/or care for unexpected crises caused by the problems they were born with. In some cases, such special care and repeated hospitalizations will have to continue for the rest of their lives (which in some cases will be cut short while in other cases they may live well into adulthood or even a full, normal life-span but will never be able to become a contributing member of society and in particular will always be a net economic drain). Even if the necessary care only lasts a few months (a year or less, maybe) and afterward the child is able to live an entirely or mostly normal life and grow up to become a contributing member of society, the costs for the care required during that first year or so may easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars (maybe even top a million dollars in some cases, particularly when the problems are due to multiple births and each of the n-uplets requires such care because they were all born with low birth weight). Such care is certainly in the BMW (or perhaps Ferrrari or Lamborgni) price range, but what should "we" (as a nation, a government, a health-care system, etc.) do about it? Let us presume as was the case in the cases I have heard of on other lists that the families are ordinary middle-class working people who when it comes to cars typically look for a late-model used Chevy rather than a new car of any type and certainly never imagine themselves owning a BMW (except perhaps in their daydreams when they win the Powerball lottery) and that no one can be considered "at fault" for the problems that the child was born with: the parents were as far as anyone knew or could tell healthy, did not smoke, drink alcohol, use drugs, work in a factory or other environment where they were exposed to toxic chemicals or use such at home or in some second job or hobby, did not engage in any other risky behaviors, did not have any known genetic defects, had early and regular pre-natal care (during which we presume nothing amiss was detected, or at least not until it was too late medically or legally to do anything about it), nothing untoward happened during labor and delivery, etc. How should such cases be addressed by the US health care system? -- Ronn! :) _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
