the gift of gab

Last night I watched P.O.V. – Critical Condition on PBS.
Roger Weisberg’s Critical Condition is a powerful, eye-opening look at the health care crisis in America. In an election season when health care reform has become one of the nation’s most hotly debated issues, Critical Condition lays out the human consequences of an increasingly expensive and inaccessible system. …Weisberg allows ordinary hard-working Americans to tell their harrowing stories of battling critical illnesses without health insurance. Read the full synopsis here.
Click here to see the film in its entirety. I highly recommend it. It is about 85 minutes long, but incredibly eye-opening.
I don’t know what the answer is to our health care crisis. Do we lower insurance premiums? Do we provide global health care for all Americans?
What I do know is that our system in horrible condition. This past summer, on two separate occasions, women died in hospital emergency rooms while others stoodby either helpless to do anything or indifferent to the suffering. Click here to watch the stories of Edith Rodriguez in Los Angeles and Esmin Green in New York City.
The uninsured (and some of us who are insured) are unable to pay for medications. So, many are forced to stop taking their medications regularly and become much sicker. We shuffle our uninsured from one medical facility to the next. Appointments are months out and we tell them to wait until it’s “really bad” before we will provide any worthwhile remedy. We stick uninsured patients with bills that are often 2 1/2 times higher than what the insurance companies are billed. Is it any wonder that so many wait even to seek treatment? Doesn’t the worry and stress about how they will pay for it make them even sicker?
I know that in many developing countries around the world, patients are required to pay for medical care before treatment begins. Here, we decry the inhumane and unjust treatment. We condemn the medical care and practices in those countries.
Is what we do here in our “sophisticated and indultrialized” nation so different? What happened to equality for all?