Voices From The Wilderness
by dday
Look at this, a media organization bothered to interview some of the people suffering the most under the current health care system!
Such scaremongering has dismayed and infuriated Sharon Lee, the doctor who now treats Manley in Kansas City. “I’m very angry, very angry,” she says. “Many of the people I treat have already been in front of a death panel and have lost – a death panel controlled by insurance companies. I see people dying at least monthly because we have been unable to get them what they needed.”
Lee’s clinic, Family Health Care, is a refuge of last resort. It picks up the pieces of lives left shattered by a health system that has failed them, and tries to glue them back together. It exists largely outside the parameters of formal health provision, raising funds through donations and paying all its 50 staff – Lee included – a flat rate of just $12 an hour […]
Beth Gabaree, who came in to see Lee for the first time this morning, has experiences that sound extreme but are in fact quite typical. She has diabetes and a heart condition. Until two years ago they were controlled through ongoing treatment paid for by her husband’s work-based health insurance. But he was in a motorbike crash that pulverised his right leg and put him out of work.
That Catch 22 again: no work, no insurance, no treatment. Except in this case it was Beth who went without treatment, in order to put her husband’s dire needs first. He receives ongoing specialist care that costs them $500 a go, leaving nothing for her. So she stopped seeing a doctor, and effectively began self-medicating. She cut down from two different insulin drugs to regulate her diabetes to one, and restricted her heart drugs. “I do what I think I need to do to keep four steps out of hospital. I know that’s not the right thing, but I can’t justify seeing the doctor when my family’s already in money trouble.”
The problem is that she hasn’t kept herself four steps out of hospital. Her health deteriorated and earlier this year she became bedridden. Even then, it took her family several days to persuade her to go to the emergency room because she didn’t want to incur the hospital costs. “It was hard enough without that,” she says.
After an initial consultation, Lee has now booked Gabaree for a new round of tests for her diabetes and is arranging for free medication. “It’s wonderful,” Gabaree says. “I’m so blessed. I didn’t know you could get this sort of help.”
That she sees basic healthcare as a blessing, not as a right, speaks volumes about attitudes among the mass of the working poor. Also revealing is the fact that Gabaree has absolutely no idea about the debate raging across America. She hasn’t even heard of Obama’s push for health reform, nor the Republican efforts to prevent it. “I don’t watch much television,” she says.
There are 47 million voiceless people who have no access to the health care debate itself, let alone access to participate in it. They would be the biggest beneficiaries of reform, and yet they lack information about what is being attempted, and they certainly lack the wherewithal to do anything meaningful about it. At least this one news organization has offered a small voice to those suffering through the horrors of the lifestyle of the permanent underclass in America.
One thing though.
This story will never be read in an American newspaper. It comes from The UK Guardian.
Hey, at least the Brits are getting the full range of debate…
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