No health insurance, no heart transplant

[Barack_America]

No health insurance, no heart transplant

By Jeff Ferrell - bio|email

SHREVEPORT, LA (KSLA) - The health care debate in this country has become an emotional, hot-button issue. That's led some people to draw false conclusions about the ranks of the uninsured which now include 46-million Americans.

One such example: An Ark-La-Tex woman we met who had a a full-time job as a bank teller supervisor, which included full insurance coverage. But, it would be a massive heart attack one weekend that changed the course of her life forever.

<snip>

Her sister, Pamela Nelson, finally convinced Sandra to try the emergency room. "I just remember the doctor saying, ‘you're having a massive heart attack.'" But by then her heart had suffered severe damage. While sitting with her two sisters and Sandra's mother behind the camera, Henry described the extent of the damage, and the status of her heart failure. "It's only working at ten to fiften percent."

That was a year and a half ago. Later deemed disabled and then unable to keep paying the medical Cobra coverage, Sandra and her family pinned their hopes on Medicare and Medicaid, to get on a heart transplant list.

Her sister Pamela lamented, "you don't know the complications and the fine print of it until it's your family and you start dealing with it." But Sandra Henry discovered she doesn't qualify for full coverage under either Medicaid or Medicare and therefore cannot get on a transplant list....

More:
http://www.ksla.com/Global/story.asp?S=10832482&nav=menu50_11_12

Illness...job loss...insurance loss...too young for Medicare, not poor enough for Medicaid...dying...the American health care crisis in a nutshell.

[Crunchy Frog]

1. This is why I'm not an organ donor.

Not until I know they would be allocated fairly, according to need.

[cynatnite]

3. That is a rotten reason to not be an organ donor. n/t

[cynatnite]

2. This is why denying that reform is needed is so fucking insane...

People are dying because of the system that's currently in place. It's immoral.

[Barack_America]

4. And now the CBO has concluded that preventative care saves lives, but not money.

I can't wait to hear the RW argue this.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitol-briefing/2009/08/cbo_preventive_care_may_likely.html?wprss=capitol-briefing

This will bring us to the crux of the issue; lives vs. bottom lines.

[eridani]

5. The CBO is 100% correct

And I am speaking as one who has had preventative care help me overcome my lousy genes, thus enabling me to live long enough to increase the risk of all kinds of expensive bad things happening to me. When my grandmother was my age, she had been dead for 9 years. When my father was my age, he had been dead for 3 years. They saved the syatem a hell of a lot of money by dropping dead early.