It’s so hard to be the doctor who has to reveal: ‘I’m not giving you a death sentence by telling you you have cancer. I’m giving you your prognosis because you don’t have coverage."Kansas Community Health Care Doctor Julie Griffin, quoted in Life and Death in Brownback’s Kansas.
Rejection of Medicaid Expansion is one of the crimes of the new century -- deliberately harming people for nothing more than spite toward President Obama and Democrats and extremist ideology. Rejected again by Florida, as described in this diary.
And yet, how many people outside of the politically involved on Kos and elsewhere really know what is happening and how criminal and unnecessary it is.
I try to listen to the outstanding Kagro in the Morning Show every day -- either live or the later podcast. Yesterday, Kagro (David Waldman) read and commented on the above article by Kai Wright in The Nation. Please read and circulate it widely. It is informative, heart rending and infuriating.
You'll read about Charmaine, who had a good job, with health insurance at Big Lots, a furniture chain. She worked her way up to a manager position after 15 years, but then was laid off at 51. All she could find was a health aide job for $9.70 per hour, but then she developed ulcerative colitis. She could not afford the $1,000 per month cost of anti-inflammatory drugs.
By July 2014, it had become a crisis. “One day I got up in the morning and just—” She flinches at the memory. “Blood, solid blood just coming out of me like a waterfall.”Charmaine had the bad luck to live in Kansas, one of the 21 states that have rejected Medicaid Expansion, so she's in the gap -- too poor to be helped by subsidies, but too "rich" (i.e., just over the 138% of poverty cutoff) to get Medicaid.She ended up, at [community health center Doctor Julie] Griffin’s advice, in a Bartlesville, Oklahoma, emergency room, one of the nearest hospitals with a gastroenterologist. Charmaine spent two weeks there, the first of five hospital stays over six months last year. The second stay came just two days after the first. She was running an errand at Walgreen’s when she lost control of her bowels. “It was one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever been through,” she says.
This time she went straight to the local ER. They found a gastroenterologist at Kansas University Medical Center who they believed could help, but she would have to get to Kansas City, 165 miles north—an expensive ambulance ride for someone without insurance. “Here I am sitting here, bleeding like crazy, and I’ve got to find a way to get to Kansas City right then. Finally, they had me sign a document saying I had to pay the $4,000 if I wanted to get to the hospital. So I agreed! I signed it.”
The Kansas City doctors discovered that she had picked up a bacterial infection that had complicated the colitis. Now her inflamed colon won’t heal, and the upshot is thousands of dollars in medication and ongoing doctors’ appointments. She’s lost track of the debt she’s racked up.
Read the whole article.
You'll read about RaDonna, dying of colon cancer and complications, forced to live with her sister, who is now bankrupt because of RaDonna's medical bills. She may have been saved by treatment.
You'll read about Martha Talbot, who delayed going to the hospital despite chest pains, finally went and was diagnosed with atrial fibrilliation, and now has $14,000 in bills she and her husband cannot begin to pay.
The only excuse Medicaid Expansion rejectors give is no excuse -- that someday, the state may have to pay if the federal government doesn't. That's an argument against the state receiving any federal aid, lest someday it might stop. It's an argument saying "people have to die now because someday something may happen and maybe people will die then." In other words, total, utter nonsense.
Tomorrow, Sunday show guests will include Chris Christie, Mitt Romney, Lindsay Graham and Paul Ryan. I doubt any of them will be asked to comment on the terrible effects of Medicaid Expansion rejection. I've hardly seen any coverage of it.
So it's up to us, just like the coverage of Kansas noted in this diary today, to let people know about how sociopathic actors are harming real people.
Please read and circulate the Nation article. The Brownback victims described deserve at least that.
I'll leave the last word to Charmaine:
"I’m not ready to give up. I’m a hard worker,” She says, before breaking down in tears. She’s been taking anti-depressants for the first time in her life. “I’ve worked 30-some years and paid my dues, and here I can’t get any help?"