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The real-life costs of a broken health care system

In his response to my health care post last week, Gregory Kauffman called our current system of medical insurance a national embarrassment.

I’d go even further and call it a national disgrace. No one should die in the wealthiest country in the world because they lack health insurance or the necessary funds to pay for needed medical care. We can hardly call ourselves the greatest country on earth when this is how we treat our own citizens.

Even those who play by the rules and do everything they are supposed to do are not immune. We’ve all heard the stories of those who paid dearly for insurance, only to find out that when they needed it the most, their insurance company wouldn’t cover their needs, or worse, that their policy was being cancelled because, well, they were actually using it. And then there are those whose employers provide their health care coverage, but whose illnesses make it necessary to leave their jobs, at which point they lose that insurance. That exact scenario happened to a friend of our family several years ago. He spent his entire career working for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania but had to leave his job when he was diagnosed with lung cancer and became too sick to work. As a result, he lost the very insurance he needed to keep him alive. He died, basically because he didn’t have enough money to keep himself alive and didn’t want to burden his family with debt. And he is far from the only one. Citizens dying or having to declare bankruptcy after getting the care they need is a near epidemic.

And, unfortunately, the embarrassments in our health care system don’t stop at the level of insurance. The incompetence, mismanagement and simple greed attendant to today’s medical delivery systems are often appalling.

Having a background in science, I have a lot of friends who work in the health care industry and have heard their stories. One, a nurse, watched a young male patient’s attempts at managing his gall bladder problems with diet and lifestyle changes sabotaged by doctors and other nurses who chose to believe he would never stick to his behavior and so substituted the low-fat menu choices he’d made at the hospital with foods like lasagna and creamed chicken in an effort to force him into a surgery he didn’t want.

Then there’s my social worker friend who’s spent her career doing medical research and can easily read a patient chart who was lied to by a member of the hospital staff when she asked why a family member had been taken off needed medication and requested they be put back on. After being told repeatedly that the situation had been rectified, but seeing from the chart that it hadn’t, the staff finally relented. Her sister has an even more harrowing story. An intake nurse in what used to be a local, independent hospital, she’s one of the unfortunate employees who saw how things changed when the institution was taken over by one of the regional medical conglomerates. The hospital began turning away sick patients at the door, leaving beds open for those coming in for elective surgery who would be paying out of their own pocket and providing bigger profit margins.

That same hospital used to send overflow patients to a local Catholic charity hospital, which was recognized as being one of the best institutions around. Unfortunately, the medical group that took over her hospital decided that it wanted that property for its own use, halted the practice of sending patients there and eventually squeezed them out, forcing one of the region’s most respected institutions to close and throwing dozens of people out of work.

Making a profit is all well and good, but when you’re doing it at the expense of the health and often lives of patients, there’s something really wrong with that.

And when you see health care not as a basic human right but as some sort of reward along the lines of the other trappings of success that allow you to believe that you have somehow set yourself apart from others, believing that only certain individuals have “earned” the right to health care and that those who sweep your floors, pick up your trash, stock your store shelves, prepare and deliver your orders at your favorite restaurants, pave your roads, watch over your kids and keep the lines functioning so you have telephone service, an Internet connection and cable TV, basically those who invisibly support your life every day, aren’t  among that select few, well, there’s something really wrong with that, too.

July 28, 2009 at 8:14 pm

--Tammy Alonso

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