For Poor, America’s a Sinking Ship

[Joanne98]

Last week in New York authorities announced that at Harlem Hospital Center, the largest health facility in that historic neighborhood, doctors had failed to read 4,000 heart tests — for three years — and that 200 of these patients died. These were not simply routine tests, but echocardiograms, ordered when patients showed severe symptoms. That does not happen in affluent neighborhoods.

Among other reasons, heart sickness is elsewhere an enormous profit opportunity — heart valve and bypass surgeries are a go-go business. But not for sick, poor people. Their Medicaid coverage fails to fully incentivize America’s insatiable medical industrial appetite.

According to a cardiologist brought in on an emergency basis to start reading the long backlog of tests in Harlem, approximately half were abnormal and 20 to 30 percent needed immediate medical care. “This is very, very appalling,” he told the New York Times. And it’s not just in Harlem.

Across the US, poor communities are grossly under-served: education, nutrition, housing and health care. To a large extent, this explains the chasm in life expectancy between white people and so-called minorities

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/06/03/for-poor-americas-a-sinking-ship/

[patrice]

1. Obvious: The more wealthy you are the less responsibility you have for your own behaviors.

The poorer you are the more responsibility you have for your own behavior.

[SocialistLez]

2. Disgusting, disgusting........DISGUSTING!!

[salguine]

3. This is why I remain convinced that this is necessary:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_oJ1idzuym4U/SHKiJl42ByI/AAAAAAAAALE/trSN1PZwLEU/s400/The+French+Revolution.jpg

[burnsei sensei]

4. +1 here.

Where is the guillotine indeed when we need it?
If the elites wish to deal in blood, let it be their own.

[proudohioan]

6. May I help you build it???? n/t

[mntleo2]

5. Dependent on Medicare myself and ...

...just went through a "breathing test" because I am coughing my guts out every night, cannot take a deep breath, sometimes cannot talk, and cannot laugh without coughing. Since I also have another health issue that makes coughing a problem, this makes for a messy and embarrassing thing. Got a letter from the "doctor" who said my breathing is fine. I am in WA state and the clinic I am forced to go to is for Medicaid people since other doctors cannot afford to take Medicaids, soooo ....go figure. I am seeing this doc next week and I think I will bring a printout of this article, but it will do little good because they have "reasons" for everything and all the power, you know?

Cat in Seattle

[grasswire]

7. put them on notice that you belong to an Internet activist group...

...with more than a hundred thousand members who are willing to spread the word about unsatisfactory attention to your situation. !

Or you could use Michael Moore's name. He said it was okay

[mntleo2]

8. Great idea! I think I will n/t