I take it personally…
… when some pot-smoking Ron Paul devotee, libertarian nihilist faux intellectual or good old-fashioned right wing jackass argues against “socialized medicine.” Today, I got another reminder why.
My aunt — a born-again evangelical in the suburbs of Indianapolis — was laid off a while back. She has high blood pressure… and no job to pay for the medication she takes to treat it. To save money, she stopped taking her medication. Now she’s in the hospital, having sufferered a stroke earlier this week.
The doctors say she should recover, but it’s unclear what she’ll have lost in terms of movement and/or speech. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that the math is not in her favor. Over the next 90 days alone, my aunt will likely pay ~$15,000 in stroke-related care costs. And there is also a one-in-four chance that she will have another stroke in the next five years. [1]
A couple of observations:
This didn’t need to happen. High blood pressure is one of the most preventable and manageable conditions out there. Medication might not have even been necessary with proper medical supervision geared toward lifestyle management, rather than meds management and acute care. Without insurance, though, the question of seeing a doctor when it’s not an emergency — or even buying pills to prevent an emergency — is merely academic.
The system is broken and the fee-for-all market is not going to fix it. This scenario may never have occurred had my aunt’s access to medication not been tied to employment the money in the wallet.
This incident will cost you, me and everyone. If my aunt can’t afford her prescription, how do you think she’s going to aford $15,000 in hospital costs? Likely, they’ll squeeze some money out of her, further exacerbating her current economic woes. In fact, medical costs are a factor in at least half of all bankrupties in the U.S. [2]
Depending on how much blood hispital administrators can squeeze from this particular turnip, they’ll either write down the loss and pass on the costs to other healthcare consumers or — as is often the case — pass the costs on to the public sector. In 2005, the cost of uncompensated care for the uninsured was an estimated $34 billion. The public sector — taxpayers like you and me — picked up 85% of that tab. Doctors provided an additional $5.1. billion in free or reduced cost care. [3]
So the next time you hear some overexcited Joe the Plumber wannabe shrieking about Obama’s plan to socialize medicine or extolling the virtues of an economic model premised on screwing over our most vulnerable and hoping that somebody — anybody but the government — still gives enough of a damn to try to turn a buck off of alleviating human sufferring, please do me a favor:
Think of my aunt and then you tell them that they can go straight to hell.
Notes
[1] http://www.theuniversityhospital.com/stroke/stats.htm
