This is not a side effect, this is not an added feature, this is how the system was designed. This is what they want.
Please, everyone, say it with me now:
THIS IS THE FUTURE THE CONSERVATIVES WANT.
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Been like that for millenia
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I think there’s a reporting problem here.
Insured or not the urgent care should have seen him enough to know if he was stable or not. However, given that he arrested on the way to the hospital it sounds like he was in far too bad shape for an urgent care, their proper course of action would be to send him to the ER anyway.
I also suspect that it was an exercise in futility anyway–I doubt very much the ER could have saved him.
And of those with insurance, a large number are afraid to actually use it for fear they’ll still end up bankrupt.
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No. Take him. Not send him. If they couldn’t treat him in urgent care then the right thing to do is to make sure he got to where he could be treated ASAP. Turning him away because he was out of network or uninsured was fucking despicable.
Dismissing the death of a child based on your own rando internet medical speculations based on reporting you yourself call into question is, well…if you’re not voting for your local fascist party, you’re probably in the wrong tent.
JFC.
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“Take him” is easy to say–but it’s not going to happen. Medical facilities do not have transport capability. If a patient needs to go somewhere they either get there on their own or by ambulance.
I’ve walked into the quick care with insurance, the doc decided I needed the ER–the only transport option they had was call an ambulance.
Just because you want to be outraged at the situation doesn’t make it so.
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Which they didn’t.
Your patronizing dreck aside, I’m not outraged at the care providers who are stressed more than most. I’m furious at the inhumane insurance system that let this happen.
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Aside from your apparent lack of empathy in general, you’re failing to abide by the terms of service, mainly:
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Simply unacceptable. Health insurance should be available to all, at reasonable cost. If this is not possible, then we should change it.
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From a PBS site at the top of my search results:
“About 44 million people in this country have no health insurance, and another 38 million have inadequate health insurance.”
It was even worse before the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare).
The urgent care center in question belongs to an HMO, so it’s probably completely standard for them to turn away people who aren’t members of the HMO. I’m sure this teen isn’t the first person to have suffered ill consequences from this situation. Somehow, people are expected to magically know that certain hospitals and medical centers aren’t open to the public.
The emergency room at a regular hospital must provide life saving and stabilizing care regardless of the patient’s ability to pay. In California, e.r.'s aren’t even supposed to ask financial questions before being triaged or seen by a doctor.
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For a good number of people the value to “reasonable” is really low, at that point it might as well just be free. In my rougher days i probably wouldn’t have been able to afford an additional unexpected bill regardless of how much it was, its likely true for a good number of folks.
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Others have already covered the point that many in the USA still have no health insurance. However, even for those who do…
https://twitter.com/haircut_hippie/status/806727683195355136
(the following quote is from that Twitter thread)
my first rotation as a med student. Obamacare had kicked in. but I kept seeing ppl coming in far too late, refusing followup care, etc. why?
they had insurance! Obamacare meant that they’d be spared from truly financially disastrous illnesses like cancer. so what was the deal.
talk to guy. fam history of esophageal cancer. guy has severe acid reflux. recommend endoscopy. he refuses. why?
see his deductible: $5000!
for you non-Americans: the first $5000 of his medical care in the calendar year, he pays for out of pocket.
answer is obvious: can’t afford
cost just of scoping to diagnose problem: ~$1500. biopsy, $100. add a $100 specialist followup, and you still haven’t even touched treatment
the doctor works 7am-7pm M-F. Saturdays @ hospital. b/c she sees poor pts, she pays her staff thru her salary. earning ~$10k/year herself
this is b/c she does “long” (half-hour) appts. doesn’t over-book. many indigent patients, even if they have insurance.
i can tell you this story again and again. this isn’t even a particularly poor area, but docs who saw poor pts were taking >100k/yr pay cuts
had multiple child psych docs quit b/c our new guidelines changed to basically: just give the kids drugs. b/c TX social services are fucked
so this is the problem: Obama’s signature accomplishment, Obamacare, had almost zero influence on any of the poorest patients we have
the effect was to transform healthcare from totally unaffordable to totally unaffordable. most ppl still had impossible barriers to care
“what about Medicaid?”
I live in Texas. we refused Medicaid expansion. & even if you’re (magically) eligible, getting it can be a nightmare
In medical treatment, there’s a ~guideline of the simpler the better. One pill a day, OK. Two pills, not good. Three pills, too difficult
Every single extra step a patient has to take reduces the odds that a patient will/can be treated properly. It’s a big deal.
All this wonk bullshit in Obamacare? I’ve seen grown adults cry b/c they can’t figure out wtf is going on w/their care. it’s a nightmare
if me, the doc, the nurse, a social worker, the patient, & the insurance co can’t figure out what’s going on, maybe your bill sucks
if you need a team of economists, Vox, and two hundred men wearing lanyards to explain how you’re helping the poor, maybe you aren’t
b/c for the poor, in the case of Obamacare the test came when they went to the doc for the first time & it was still hellish & unaffordable
oh, and I can’t tell you whatever happened to the reflux + family history of esophageal cancer guy. b/c he never came back
Combine that with:
(back to me)
To spell it out: health insurance with a deductible of more than a few hundred dollars is essentially null and void for most Americans. It provides zero benefit outside of extraordinary circumstances.
Forcing people to pay for functionally non-existent healthcare does not help them. It hurts them.
The pre-ACA situation was diabolical. The post-ACA situation is still diabolical.
If you’re going to socialise healthcare, as you should, you need to do it properly
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I agree, but that’s no excuse for dismantling the half-measures. I know that’s not what you’re saying, but a lot of ACA critics have an all-or-nothing fundamentalism. I know people who are alive today because of the ACA. It’s far from adequate, but it’s not equivalent to the pre-ACA situation. Not for those whose lives depend on it.
That said, we have to move beyond it. Politics isn’t a static graph. If we don’t progress, we regress. Medicare for All.
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For the self-employed middle class who gained access to usable healthcare, for the middle class with pre-existing conditions, for the poor people in a limited selection of states that benefited from Medicaid expansion, the ACA was a life-changing advance.
For the working class people who did not gain access to Medicaid, the ACA was arguably a step backwards. Healthcare was still functionally inaccessible to them, but now they were forced to pay for the healthcare that they still did not receive.
It’s a mixed bag.
And it is also important to consider the broader context. The ACA was based upon Romneycare, and Romneycare was designed by the GOP and the health insurance industry for the purpose of maintaining industry profits and preventing the introduction of real socialised medicine. It wasn’t a concession, it was an entrenchment.
Abolishing the ACA would not substantially improve matters overall; it would ease the financial strain for the functionally-uninsured, but remove healthcare from others who rely upon it. OTOH, defending the ACA is basically doing the corporations’ work for them.
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I could be in error, but AFAIK the individual mandate was never actually enforced.
Absolutely. And that’s why we need universal healthcare. Moreover, the present global crisis has shown the need for prioritizing healthcare the way we prioritize defense. (I’m also for de-prioritizing the dick-sizing of defense spending, but that’s another topic.)
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What happens if you have just lost your job?
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Putting everyone on “insurance” isn’t an answer, there’s not an underwriter alive who would insure everyone and everything. This is why we have bullshit like “re-insurance” and “co-insurance” and “co-pays” … because insurance is a fucked up business model meant to make money, not heal the sick or fix things. It is a fucking gambling system that americans seem to be brainwashed into thinking is as necessary as water or bread.
Who’s your favorite pet lizard? The 15% british devil he is. Damn Damn the English man, no I will not buy your life backed annuity. You want $2500 a YEAR for what? Really, at $2500 a year, I at least want SOMETHING for my money you scoundrels, because this “piece of mind” you’re selling, I’m not buying.
I say, clean em all out, put the cash in a bucket, next time there’s a crash, at fault adds to the bucket, not at fault takes from the bucket based on ability to pay. When the bucket is empty, there’s 0.05 gas/unit or 0.01 electricity/unit tax to fill it up again. Tax goes away when bucket is full. Vote lambaste, your resident president, making less fucked up laws in your town since 1976. Damn lizard should get a real job.
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Death panels.
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This is true. With the testing situation what it is, any death from acute respiratory failure is suspicious (as well as sudden cardiomyopathy, it appears) but this can only be sorted out in retrospect. For now, the numbers may serve as a sort sample or indicator, but are very far from telling the true story.
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There are increasing reports of acute overwhelming viral myocarditis emerging in folks who have been on a ventilator for a time for covid-19. This may be one of the reasons Seattle has sufficient ventilators (for now) but has run out of ECMO machines, and has established some pretty draconian standards to get one. This occurs when the virus directly infects the heart tissue and compromises function.
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