Dontae Adams was a little boy who had a dog chew on his face. His mom took him to University of Chicago Hospital and when they found out he had medicaid they gave him a prescription and a tetanus shot and sent him on his way. Mom knew this wasn't right. She took him on a bus (They are on medicaid, right, she's poor and doesn't have a car.) with bloody gauze on his face to another hospital and they rushed him into surgery. Now, I wonder, would Dontae have been admitted to UCH if he had private insurance. Seems like the Hospital was worried about getting paid. Patched Dontae up and sent him off. If this is what it's like to be on Medicaid, what is Obamacare going to be like? Whenever the government tries to run something it gets all fouled up. Comments?
I forgot the link from the Tribune http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2009/feb/13/local/chi-ucmedicalfeb15
Had the same thing happen to a friend of mine in France a few years ago. He had an ear infection, at first they said his hearing was at risk and they needed to do all these fancy things including surgery, but then they found out he didn’t have insurance and sent him away with some antibiotics. He had it checked out when he got back to the UK saw a doctor (free of charge) who sent him onto a specialist (free of charge) who did a series of test (that were free of charge) and concluded that he was fine and antibiotics was all that he’d needed and all the other things the French had been talking about were probably just a way of scamming the insurance. The thing is that under an insurance type system it pays for health facilities to give every treatment possible to the insured, but not to the uninsured. So under such a system there is the possibility of some people getting more care and treatment than they need and others not getting the things they need. Under a UK type national health system things are free at the point of entry but paid for by a national insurance scheme and general taxation. People’s treatments are decided on medical grounds not on how much money can be made off them (or not). Now according to the World Health Organization's ranking of the world's health systems (from 2000) The UK is placed eighteenth and the US 37th. But the supposed expenditure on health as percentage of GDP in 2005 places the US at second most expensive (15.2), and the UK at 41st (8.2). So the UK gives better service at a lower price. And here is an interesting article from the American Association of Retired Persons magazine that might be of interest. ‘Why Does Health Care Cost So Much?’ By Shannon Brownlee, July & August 2008 http://www.aarpmagazine.org/health/health_care_costs.html Here is an extract - “By every conceivable measure, the health of Americans lags behind the health of citizens in other developed countries. Our life expectancy is shorter than that of citizens in Canada, Japan, and all but one Western European country. We rank 43rd in the world in infant-mortality rates, behind Cuba, the Czech Republic, and the United Kingdom. We are no less disabled by disease than citizens of most developed nations, and our medical care is, with few exceptions, no better at helping us survive specific diseases. For instance, the mortality rate from prostate cancer in the United Kingdom is virtually the same as it is in the United States, despite the fact that the disease is treated far less aggressively in the U.K.” *
I went into the hospital with medicaid and they did everything except give me a private room. And they did that too, for a couple days. Guess they see medicaid as a good way to guarantee they get paid. So they slap a few extra things on there that were unnecessary. One time I also caught the hospital billing me for things that they never used. When I called them on it I was told those things were on the bill because they ASSUMED they would be used...
