Steve Lopez offers up a true story that explains why we need Health Care Reform in this country. In case you have trouble with the pay wall over at the L.A. Times site, I'll summarize: An 11-year-old girl had a tummy ache. On the advice of her doctor, her father took her to an emergency room. There turned out to be nothing really wrong with her but the father, who could ill afford it, got a bill for $5000.
I absolutely believe that. In fact, based on the three times in the last three years I've taken others to emergency rooms, I'm surprised it was only five grand. In one case, it topped $18,000 for not that much more treatment.
As then-candidate Barack Obama noted in the video clip I posted two and a half hours ago (before I came across Lopez's article), folks who can't afford health insurance these days have two options when they get sick. They fall into the Medicaid pool, which means we pay for their medical care…or they go to an emergency room which means that when we go to one, we pay for their medical care. In this case, the little girl's father could afford insurance. He just couldn't afford insurance that didn't have a $5000 deductible.
With the Supreme Court opening the question of the mandate in the Affordable Care Act, we're about to hear a lot more about "Obamacare" and how it's socialized medicine in that it forces people to pay for the medical bills of others. We already have socialized medicine in this country in the sense that we've decided not to let human beings die in the street because they can't afford a doctor. If that's what the opponents of Obamacare want, I wish they'd just say it. If it's not what they want (and I doubt it is), they need to come up with a better, more efficient way for society to take care of those who are broke and sick.