Few things hurt worse than an earache. A toothache is its equal, and sciatica can be excruciating. None of these conditions, however, is life threatening. Consequently, if you’re uninsured, none of them will qualify you for treatment at an emergency room.
Now, if you show up at an emergency room suffering from any of these curses the medical staff will see you, and you will be examined. But, that’s as far as it will go. Once a quick examination reveals that your life is not in immediate danger your suffering will be ignored, and your pleas for treatment to ease your pain or cure the cause of it will likely fall on deaf ears. You’ll be examined, then you will be turned out. Sent away. If you’re given an aspirin you will be among the lucky few.
Kathy Myers, featured in the CNN video clip at right, was in pain—severe, but not life threatening, pain. Her local hospital wasn’t overly sympathetic. No health insurance, no treatment.
It’s a simple policy, and one which is an affront to any standard of human decency. It’s the policy that drove Kathy to take up a handgun and shoot a bullet through her shoulder so that she might, finally, qualify for effective treatment of her excruciating shoulder pain. Kathy, as it turned out, was an unlucky person. The bullet went in one side of her shoulder and came out the other, creating a terribly painful, but not life threatening, wound. It wasn’t enough to kill her, and it wasn’t enough to qualify for the needed treatment of her continuing shoulder problem. It just hurt like hell.
A few years ago I had a friend named John. He lived right around the corner from our house, and he suffered from failed kidneys. He needed renal dialysis daily, but he had no medical insurance. Often when his brother would take him to the emergency room at the local municipal hospital the staff would turn him away because he “wasn’t sick enough yet.” Sure, his blood was dirty, his potassium level was through the roof and he was weak and sick, but in the emergency staff’s judgment he wasn’t quite sick enough to deserve treatment.
One day the staff sent John home around noon and told him to “come back when you’re a little worse.” John died later that afternoon.
It’s wrong, isn’t it? Isn’t it wrong to let people suffer when the means to relieve their suffering is readily available? Wasn’t it wrong to withhold dialysis from John because he’d climbed only eight of the ten steps leading up to death’s door? You understand that it’s wrong, don’t you?
Over the past year we heard much about health care reform. Congress passed and the President signed a health insurance reform package. Nothing has changed. People like Kathy Myers still go untreated, and people like John still die. Regularly, predictably and to our everlasting shame as a people.
I began by saying that few things hurt worse than an earache, toothache or pressure on the sciatic nerve. There is something that hurts a good deal worse. It’s knowing that the American people—the people you work and socialize with and of whom you are a part—don’t really care if you’re sick, don’t care if you’re hurting and don’t care if you die. They only care if you can pay. That’s why they vote for Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats. It’s why health care reform wasn’t.
Tomorrow will begin another day of suffering for people like Kathy Myers. Tomorrow will be the day that many like John will pass from this life because their country refused to help them live another day. Tomorrow begins another day in the life of America, a life unthreatened by the suffering of its poor.
