Health Care is a Basic Human Right--Almost Everywhere but Here

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Health-Care-is-a-Basic-Hum-by-Ronald-Pies-110313-363.html

In a recent piece in the Boston Globe, David Abel described a 52-year-old woman named Ona Stewart. Despite being deaf and blind, she is able to live independently, and earn a living by making pottery. Ona Stewart has no family in the area, and relies on a state-funded program that provides aides who help her communicate, shop, and run errands. But now, the proposed Massachusetts budget for 2012 eliminates funding for this program--threatening to leave the DeafBlind Community Access Network high and dry. For people like Ona Stewart, this could mean ""dangerous risks to safety"possible hospitalizations due to failing health"and institutionalizations", according to Sharon Applegate, executive director of Deaf, Inc., which oversees the aid program.

Ona Stewart's plight is just one forlorn strand in the unraveling fabric of the American health care system--if "system" is not too generous a term. Despite our tremendous progress in medical research and technological innovation, our health care system is not taking care of those who need it most: the very poor and sick, whose friends, family, or community cannot or will not help them. Far from having "the best health care system in the world"--as some politicians persistently claim--our system is failing in the most basic measures of medical care. For example, according to a 2002 study by the Institute of Medicine, 18,000 Americans die every year because they don't have health insurance. And, in a recent Commonwealth Fund-supported study comparing "preventable deaths" in 19 industrialized countries, researchers found that the United States placed last.

Our failures in health care are not for lack of spending. As Victor Fuchs PhD, of Stanford University recently noted in the New England Journal of Medicine (Dec. 2, 2010), the U.S. government currently spends more per capita for health care than eight European countries spend from all sources on health care. And yet, life expectancy at birth in every one of these eight countries is higher than that in the U.S. The huge amount of money spent on administrative costs in the U.S. --rather than on direct care--is a major factor in these cross-national disparities.

Furthermore, as the Center for Economic and Social Rights notes, "Although the United States offers coverage for the very poorest Americans through Medicaid, this fails to reach millions of Americans who do not qualify as the "poorest" but still have far too little money to afford purchasing their own health insurance and do not have access to it through employment."

More at the link --

[dkf]

1. What I see is the unraveling of family ties.

How is it that a person in this situation has no family members nearby to help them? Isn't that the bigger problem we have today?

[jwirr]

2. That has been a problem since the early 50s when laborers started

following the jobs trail to places like California and leaving their extended families behind. I grew up during that era and watched many of our family move away from farm country and often never even visit again.

[xchrom]

3. that is an old, old right wing talking point.

let their families take care of them!

sure fire way to miss a whole bunch of people.

[My Good Babushka]

4. No

Whether you have family or not, if they are all scraping by at poverty level wages they aren't going to be able to help a family member, even if they wanted to. It is the poverty, the sickness, the homelessness, that shatters families.

[w8liftinglady]

5. I'll give you Texas as a prime example... family ties don't always help or exist

SO many of my neighbors are at or below the poverty level.Many of my patients have multiple families living in a 5 room house..My partner's students bounce from house to house,wearing shit clothes.
We are in a 2-tiered society now.