Healthcare Systems Failing in the USA

[pameladlloyd]

My husband is sitting in the next room, watching Meet the Press, while I sit at my computer and listen in, occasionally commenting on situations I find particularly vexing. There's a lot going on in the world today that's of concern (I'm understating. Bigtime!) and I'm not always happy with the ways in which politicians attempt to defend our country's position. But the thing that made me sit up and really pay attention, was the following statement, spoken by Senator Harry Reid:

In Nevada, for example, David, at our University Medical Center in Las Vegas, they stopped cancer treatment. People who are in Las Vegas--two weeks ago, women who had breast cancer treatment were said, "We have no place for you to go." They had to leave the state to do that. [link]

Now, I knew our health system was lousy, but it never even occurred to me that something like that could happen.

What other treatments, I wonder, have also been stopped. What is happening to the people who can't afford to travel out of state to seek life-saving medical treatments? How can we allow this to happen? Aren't there some less critical state governmental functions that could have been shut down, so that their operating funds could be funneled to this hospital? Why hasn't the federal government stepped in to prevent this?

This whole situation gets a big stamp of FAIL from me.

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Oh, dear. We moan here in the UK about the postcode lottery that makes some drugs available to some patients and not to others, but this usually relates to new and relatively untried treatments, not to their main medical care.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

It will be like in China, where if you can't afford care, you just resign yourself to die. I heard a mother of one of the children who been fed exclusively formula that was adulterated with melamine: he had kidney stones, and now has leukemia. (That may not be caused by the melamine; they don't know.) The family can't afford the cost of a bone marrow transplant, so the boy will just die.

:-(

[marycatelli]

Or Canada, where one out of three doctors has sent patients to the US to get treatment they can't get in Cananda