Sherry Chandler » The economics of it
The economics of it
The NYTimes this morning features an article, To Lower Costs, Hospitals Try Free Basic Care, that begins like this:
AUSTIN, Tex. — Unable to afford health insurance, Dee Dee Dodd had for years been mixing occasional doctor visits with clumsy efforts to self-manage her insulin-dependent diabetes, getting sicker all the while.
In one 18-month period, Ms. Dodd, 38, was rushed almost monthly to the emergency room, spent weeks in the intensive care unit and accumulated more than $191,000 in unpaid bills.
That is when nurses at the Seton Family of Hospitals tagged her as a “frequent flier,” a repeat visitor whose ailments — and expenses — might be curbed with more regular care. The hospital began offering her free primary care through its charity program.
With the number of uninsured Americans reaching a record 46.6 million last year, up by 7 million from 2000, Seton is one of a small number of hospital systems around the country to have done the math and acted on it. Officials decided that for many patients with chronic diseases, it would be cheaper to provide free preventive care than to absorb the high cost of repeated emergencies.
What struck me reading these opening paragraphs was how sick this woman had to get, how much damage was done to her overall well-being and quality of life, even her possible productivity, before some one decided it would be cheaper to help her stay well.
We have had nearly three decades of propaganda for greed in this country. Politicians, movies, evangelical preachers have been selling us the idea that the righteous are rewarded with money, that the way to happiness is through consumption. Under it all has been a regressive policy that removes government safety nets, places all the financial risk on the workers, and lowers their earning power. One result is that more than 1/6 of our people have no health insurance and if you’ve ever tried to pay for a doctor’s visit out of pocket, you know that also means no access to basic primary care.
But there’s no need to be humane to see the bottom line. It is cheaper to have a healthy population. A little humanity thrown in seems to make it imperative that we have some kind of universal healthcare.
As the mother of young adults who are struggling to make ends meet in this economy, I definitely have a vested interest here. Their primary financial worry, even in their late twenties, is health insurance. Employers no longer offer coverage routinely and to buy it as an individual costs more than they can really afford with entry level jobs. I think how free they would be without that burden to pursue their goals in life and I grieve. A case of the flu can be catastrophic.
I’ve already talked about my 89-year-old mother and her struggles with the Medicare drug plan and its donut hole. Her greatest fear, she says, is not death but that death-in-life called stroke. As one who works in stroke research, I can tell you that the cost of stroke is tremendous in this country and the best/only treatment is prevention, which comes from primary healthcare.
We are throwing our people away at a prodigious rate. And it’s costing us — more than just money.
P.S. Everybody in the U.S. Congress gets free health care. Most of them don’t look like they follow any kind of wellness regimen.
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