Ronn! Blankenship wrote:
> At 10:21 AM Wednesday 5/23/2007, Dan Minette wrote:
>
>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
>>> Behalf Of jon louis mann
>>> Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2007 11:04 PM
>>> To: Killer Bs Discussion
>>> Subject: U.S. health care
>>>
>>> "Why do we behave the way we behave? What has become of us? Where is
>>> our soul?"
>>>
>>> DUMPED ON SKID ROW - Hospitals drop homeless patients on the city's
>>> Skid Row, sometimes dressed in only a flimsy gown and without a wheel
>>> chair, even if they're not healthy enough to fend for themselves.
>>> Anderson Cooper reports on the practice known as "hospital dumping."
>> The first thing that comes to mind is that this is an expectable, albeit
>> immoral, response to the mess that hospitals find themselves in with regard
>> to treatment of the indigent.
>>
>> I have had some extended conversations with my brother-in-law (a physician
>> who has a low income private practice in Northern Michigan (he sees a lot of
>> Medicaid patients, and the area is very poor). We agreed that what is
>> needed is a system in which everyone can get a Chevy, but you have to pay
>> your own money if you want a BMW.
>
>
> I have heard in recent months on other lists reports of children
> (sometimes grandchildren or nieces/nephews, etc., of listmembers) who
> were born with multiple problems which required the baby to stay in
> the hospital for months after birth during which they had to undergo
> multiple expensive medical procedures of various sorts and in many
> cases will require extensive care once they are released from the
> hospital and will have to go back to the hospital several times for
> more procedures and/or care for unexpected crises caused by the
> problems they were born with. In some cases, such special care and
> repeated hospitalizations will have to continue for the rest of their
> lives (which in some cases will be cut short while in other cases
> they may live well into adulthood or even a full, normal life-span
> but will never be able to become a contributing member of society and
> in particular will always be a net economic drain). Even if the
> necessary care only lasts a few months (a year or less, maybe) and
> afterward the child is able to live an entirely or mostly normal life
> and grow up to become a contributing member of society, the costs for
> the care required during that first year or so may easily run into
> the hundreds of thousands of dollars (maybe even top a million
> dollars in some cases, particularly when the problems are due to
> multiple births and each of the n-uplets requires such care because
> they were all born with low birth weight). Such care is certainly in
> the BMW (or perhaps Ferrrari or Lamborgni) price range, but what
> should "we" (as a nation, a government, a health-care system, etc.)
> do about it? Let us presume as was the case in the cases I have
> heard of on other lists that the families are ordinary middle-class
> working people who when it comes to cars typically look for a
> late-model used Chevy rather than a new car of any type and certainly
> never imagine themselves owning a BMW (except perhaps in their
> daydreams when they win the Powerball lottery) and that no one can be
> considered "at fault" for the problems that the child was born
> with: the parents were as far as anyone knew or could tell healthy,
> did not smoke, drink alcohol, use drugs, work in a factory or other
> environment where they were exposed to toxic chemicals or use such at
> home or in some second job or hobby, did not engage in any other
> risky behaviors, did not have any known genetic defects, had early
> and regular pre-natal care (during which we presume nothing amiss was
> detected, or at least not until it was too late medically or legally
> to do anything about it), nothing untoward happened during labor and
> delivery, etc.
>
> How should such cases be addressed by the US health care system?
Well, at present, any baby considered to be a "micro-premie", i.e. 1200
grams or smaller at birth, gets whatever NICU charges the parents'
insurance won't cover covered by Medicare -- but you have to apply to
get that. So that's one thing that's being done. But, yeah, that can
be a million dollars per baby in some cases. It's a lot more likely to
happen in the case of multiple births.
(Me, my "Twin B" was over 8 lbs. and we all went home after 2 days --
and if we'd stayed another day, it would have been because MY doctor
wanted ME to, not that the pediatrician was concerned about either of
the babies. I can't stand hospitals as a patient (or at least that one,
aside from when I was born I've stayed overnight in exactly 1 hospital)
and told the doc that if she really needed to monitor the platelet
count, my husband could take me somewhere the next morning for a blood
draw, but I really wanted to go home. She discharged me.)
Julia
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