Free Healthcare and the Poor
Janet Kuypers editorial
You know, I had to write an addendum to the healthcare article I posted recently. I talked to an RN from the Mississippi named Charlotte, and she told me that in the south, poorer people will go to the ER for things like “my baby has been crying for three days.” And because it’s an ER, they have to take care of the person and try to help. They may ask, “What is the baby’s temperature?” and the mother would reply, “I don’t know. I don’t own a thermometer.” And these same people would be the type who would ask the doctor on hand to write them a prescription for Motrin, because their Medicare would pay for it that way.
She explained to me the poor people using Medicare (at least what she has seen where she worked) don’t even understand that Medicare is insurance. A doctor might ask what type of insurance they have, and they would say they don’t have insurance, but they have Medicare.
I also heard a funny comment from one of the southern nurses studying in northern Illinois, Monica: she said something to the effect of the fact that if she has to pee into a cup periodically to be a doctor, then the same should apply for people to be on Welfare.
Then again, does that mean that we should be giving healthcare away for free? I think we’ve deduced that healthcare isn’t free (you know, that some Canadians actually pay extra so they may have access to a doctor in a reasonable amount of time, and as expensive as drugs may be in the United States, the people who create these life-saving medicines should be reimbursed for their labors). By my husband told me he heard on the radio recently that British doctors were asking to not treat the sick and infirm (and yes, the infirm are those of poor or deteriorated vitality, like people feeble from old age). So I had to actually check the validity of that one out, and I found a