Chest Pains, anyone?
The emerging mantra that “health insurance is not health care” is a useful one, as mantra’s go. It prompted me to reflect on actual access to health care in my small town 25 miles from Boston.
When we moved here in the 1980s there were several doctors in town, including at least one pediatrician. By 1996 no doctors were listed in the local phone book. This lack was somewhat relieved because we also had a community hospital in town. It had an emergency room, the usual medical services (my wife once had a diagnostic procedure done there), and one would read of old folks who were cared for in their final illness at the hospital.
Around a dozen years ago the hospital was taken over by the Caritas chain. Despite the usual assurances, after a couple of years they closed it, leaving a legacy of toxic pollutants at the site that no one seems to know how to fix. Now we had the option of 3 hospitals 10, 15, and 20 miles away. As a sop, Caritas stationed an ambulance at the closed hospital with paramedics who could give advanced life support. After a couple of years, they notified the town that this was being discontinued. So our fire chief launched a crash program to train staff as firefighter-EMTs to keep advanced life support available. Now, in a tight budget year, advanced life support is on the chopping block, and if it survives this year, it will be vulnerable in next year’s tight budget.
So, in 25 years we have seen actual access to health care deteriorate markedly. This in a town that is one of the wealthier ones in Massachusetts. Non-emergency care requires that we drive to our health center, 15 miles away. On weekends, “urgent care” requires a drive to another health center 20 miles away. For emergency care, we depend on a fragile network that would quickly break down under the stress of multiple health crises. And all through this quarter century, the cost of health care has risen almost continuously and precipitously.
So while we’re thinking about dealing with the health insurance mess, let’s not forget that in many wealthy suburban Boston towns like mine, access to health care is trudging in the direction of the Third World.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/i…
You seem reluctant to actually mention the name of your town… any particular reason? You’ve already provided enough info for a determined individual to figure it out, so there’s no real reason to be shy. I’m curious where this is.
Passed legislation that essentially de-regulated the healthcare sector, especially hospitals. One legislator went on record as to saying “OK, we’ll do it. It’ll be like putting all the scorpions in one bottle and seeing who survives.”. No indication of even any concern much less a priority given to what the impact of health sector industry de-reg. might have on the actual people in the state, huh?
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p>That industry deregulation legislation (called Chapter 495, as I recall) is what allowed market-driven dynamics to take over and has led to many of the problems of the type that this post describes.
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p>This is what we get when we allow healthcare to be treated as a commodity rather than as a public good and human right. Huge problems in access, cost and quality all stem from this same underlying cause. Visit http://www.defendhealth.org and http://www.masscare.org to learn more and to do something about it.
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p>P.S. Health policy researchers at B.U Alan Sager and Debbie Socolar predicted most of what has happened since de-reg. They tried mightily alongside others to stop it and have kept trying. They’ve also chronicled much of the market-driven changes in our state’s healthcare landscape. Their work is posted at
http://dccwww.bumc.bu.edu/hs/a…
Caritas Southwood Hospital was located in Norfolk Mass. It used to part of Neponset Valley Health System, along with Norwood Hospital. Neponset Valley put itself up for sale due to financial difficulties, and Caritas Christi was the non-profit alternative to selling out to Columbia-HCA. Caritas successfully turned Norwood around, but could not do the same for Southwood, which it subsequently closed.
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p>By third world conditions, I assume you mean you would have to drive to a hospital in another town or city.