Reply #44: Yep, we should be a society where kids just die young, if they get sick. [View All]

[salin]

*sarcasm*

Have family in the medical business. The rate of repayment - before the last cutback (not mentioning this) had already made it difficult for the small practice to cover the costs of providing care to medicaid patients. Yet they still (to date) do provide those services. I venture to guess that if one calculated the real cost of services provided to those on medicaid compared to what the govt pays - that it would be a heck of a lot better (eg what one gets in value for what one pays) than most programs. The problem is that the rate of payment is so low, that many for profit entities have stopped providing services to medicaid patients altogether.

Family member (in the baby delivery field) was asked, when he mentioned the number of places that were on the verge of stopping providing services, where he expected babies to be born? It was as if the belief was if you stop providing care that people would stop having babies.... and oddly - said family member had never even thought about this question - even though it is the most obvious extension (in terms of what happens next) to the situation that was being described (where no facility providing birthing rooms would take medicaid patients.)

So what exactly would YOU propose as an alternative? When a serious medical situation arises in a family struggling to make ends meet, working two or more jobs at minimum wage positions that offer no health benefits... what exactly should be done. Nothing? Let a treatable illness progress to where it is no longer treatable, but fatal? Is that the society that we want? Sorta makes even a big joke out of the reactions to the Schaivo case, doesn't it?