If Grady Memorial Hospital succeeds in closing its outpatient dialysis clinic, Tadesse A. Amdago, a 69-year-old immigrant from Ethiopia, said he would begin “counting the days until I die.” Rosa Lira, 78, a permanent resident from Mexico, said she also assumed she “would just die.” Another woman, a 32-year-old illegal immigrant from Honduras, said she could only hope to make it “back to my country to die.”
The patients, who have relied for years on Grady’s free provision of dialysis to people without means, said they had no other options to obtain the care that is essential to their survival. But the safety-net hospital, after years of failed efforts to drain its red ink, is not backing away from what its chairman, A. D. Correll, calls a “gut-wrenching decision”: closing the clinic this month.
The sides confronted each other in state court on Wednesday morning as lawyers for the patients sought to keep the clinic open until other arrangements for dialysis could be secured. Dialysis patients and their families packed the benches and 60-year-old Nelson Tabares, a seriously ill illegal immigrant from Honduras, was wheeled into court in a portable bed.
Despite a judge’s urging that the two sides negotiate a solution Wednesday, there was no agreement by the end of the day on how to go forward. For the time being, a restraining order keeping the clinic open stands. The judge is considering whether to extend it.
The dialysis unit on Grady’s ninth floor might as well be ground zero for the national health care debate.
I don’t see, having read this sad and well written account, how any of the plans in front of the Senate or House will do anything but actually hurt these situations. Likely the reporter intends to indirectly promote single payer in this way, but whatever your starting assumptions, it is striking to me how little any of the supposed Health Care Reform plans in the works will help these people, who should be our first and foremost target audience.
For all those who might have wondered how the government was going to make significant reductions in medicare and medicade costs, here is your answer! Nothing is free
paul
We have never as a society decided to pay for healthcare for all. Instead, we’ve made unfunded mandates that hospitals and doctors should care for the poor without regard to payment. Part of the healthcare reform debate (or lack of debate) has been to exclude non-citizens. Healthcare is expensive; it has to be paid for. This is a tragic consequence of our broken system, but I don’t blame the hospital for it. As to them being our first and foremost target audience, they certainly should be so for the Church. Whether they should be so for the Country is dubious, in my view.
1. Knapsack wrote:
[blockquote]I don’t see, having read this sad and well written account, how any of the plans in front of the Senate or House will do anything but actually hurt these situations. Likely the reporter intends to indirectly promote single payer in this way, but whatever your starting assumptions, it is striking to me how little any of the supposed Health Care Reform plans in the works will help these people, who should be our first and foremost target audience.[/blockquote]
I’m not sure that “single payer” would help the illegal immigrants or those legal immigrants waiting to become eligible for Medicaid. I rather doubt that the single payer systems in foreign countries provide for illegal immigrants. I know they don’t provide free medical care for tourists. I’m told that Canada does require temporary residents to participate in their system.
Of course one of the major problems of the various things being proposed in Congress is that they are all limited by what might possibly have a chance of passage. Single payer health care doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of getting through House, much less the Senate, for purely political reasons.
I don’t think fixing health care will help illegal immigrants for a number of reasons–among which is that Republicans and conservative Democrats will kill any such proposal.
And we aren’t likely to see any sort of meaningful immigration reform because it is opposed by the U. S. Chamber of Commerce and a variety of business interests that benefit from the way things are.
So maybe the thing to do is for the good Christian folks in Atlanta to come up with the $2 million to keep the outpatient dialysis clinic open–or is it the $33.5 million deficit of the hospital?
Ken, you wrote: I know they don’t provide free medical care for tourists. On the contrary, here in the UK tourists are covered. In theory they are covered only for the unexpected and not for pre-existing medical conditions. In practice, anybody taken ill will be treated. And yes, there has been a problem of health tourism, people coming over for free treatment.
Terry, my daughter spent a semester in London last year and took ill while there. The NHS demanded compensation from our insurance company for her treatment. Justly so, IMO.
Unfortunately “the church” is not doing this work.
5. Terry Tee wrote:
[blockquote]Ken, you wrote: I know they don’t provide free medical care for tourists. On the contrary, here in the UK tourists are covered.[/blockquote]
Fortunately, I’ve not needed medical care when visiting the UK or Europe. However, all the guide books advise that if I should need medical are abroad, I will be asked to pay for it cash in advance. Which, in turn means that I keep a rather large sum of money in my checking account, although withdrawing (via a debit card) more than a few hundred dollars at a time would be difficult. It would be nice to know that this isn’t really necessary–or that I really don’t need the expensive traveller’s medical insurance policy to reimburse me in the event of an unforeseen large medical expense.
7. julia wrote:
[blockquote]Unfortunately “the church†is not doing this work. [/blockquote]
True enough. But TEC has the mission and fiduciary duty to spend millions in litigation. So the poor, the sick, the hungry, the naked, the homeless and the stranger in our midst must wait until the GLBTQ folks have all their urges satisfied and the morale of the rest of the members improves.
The litigation will continue until moral improves; the Inquisition will continue until all opposition is suppressed.
All is well.
Apologies to Ken and Jeffersonian for late response. Ken, you will definitely not need to pay in advance at any NHS hospital for emergency treatment or urgent care. Jeffersonian, your daughter probably paid the price of truthfulness and integrity by answering ‘Yes’ when asked if she was insured. She could have simply have said No, and the treatment would have gone ahead. And if in fact she had been uninsured, the treatment would similarly have taken place.
I should have added to Ken: medical insurance in Europe, even where free treatment is guaranteed, would still be a good idea so that if you need to be flown back home in a medical emergency, a proper flight could be organized.
Ah, so to get the medical treatment, one has to LIE? Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of leading a moral life?
If I’m reading #9 correctly, you only have to lie if you want to get the medical treatment for free.
Or, to put it another way: lying can sometimes gain you a short-term material advantage. Someone had better alert the media.