Kyle, you completely missed the point.

The real problem is all around disease prevention. Good health care --
the kind that you can't get from an emergency room -- includes
promotions on healthy life styles including diet and exercise,
education on alcohol and drug abuse and education on mental health
issues among other things. More importantly, good health care includes
regular doctors visits, with doctors who are wiling to order the
proper tests and diagnostics and track you across years of visits so
that they can spot anomalies and dysfunction. This all costs money
that no indigent population can afford if they don't have proper
health insurance.  The difference between hearing that fast food is
not healthy and having a doctors point at your cholesterol and tell
you that you are not eating properly is significant. Having a MRI
ordered that shows a blocked vessel before a real problem shows up is
life saving. Having pain treated before it becomes rehabilitation and
someone turns to questionable or illegal sources of relief impacts the
community as well as the individual. The back end costs of treating
the people who do not get proper health care up front are even more
significant; emergency room visits are the most expensive way to treat
a person . Long term chronic disease that goes ignored because it
isn't an emergency costs in lost productivity and social costs
(including crime) that just don't get properly accounted for by our
leaders.  Try telling an unwed mother of three that she has to take
the day off from her minimum wage job to spend it an emergency room in
order to get her chronic pain treated and she'll simply choose to
spend $20 with her local illegal source of pain killers, and her
children will continue to get ignored in the evening as she sits
glassy eyed in front of the TV, and so the cycle will continue...

One can't simply point at any portion of the population at large and
tell them that the problem is their life style.  The problem is that
they have no way of getting access to health care (in the largest
sense of the word) that helps them eliminate unhealthy lifestyles in
the first place.

> On Sun, Aug 31, 2008 at 6:27 PM, Cleveland, Kyle E. <
> [log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Digoxin costs about $2.87 per 25mcg dose for a 30 day supply.  That dog
> doesn't hunt for me.  My out-of-pocket for an emergency room visit and
> subsequent hospitalization averages four time the out-of-pocket for the
> uninsured because I have to pick up their share of the cost.  That's no
> spin, that's how the actuarial tables work.  I have great health insurance,
> but my employer, county government, offers $4.00 co-pay cards to virtually
> anyone who doesn't have a prescription drug plan.  Sure, most of these meds
> are generics, but everything I buy is generic as well.
>
> Is the health care system broke?  It sure is.  But most ER's in university
> or community hospitals do have a dispensary for the indigent.  Here's the
> real problem:  Many people below the poverty line do not have healthy
> lifestyles.

-- 
Peter Hunsberger

-----------------------

To change your mail settings or leave the C-PALSY list, go here:

http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?SUBED1=c-palsy