dragonlady7

This made me cry.

Richter thinks of the nation's safety net as a false-bottomed prop in a black comedy when she remembers the young electrician in florid diabetic renal failure who died at age 37. She saw him for seven years. "When he went blind and was unable to work, he qualified for Medicaid," she says.
Officially disabled, the electrician qualified for Social Security Disability. But then he no longer qualified for Medicaid, which meant he could no longer pay for his medicines, which Social Security does not cover. To pay for his medicine, the blind electrician went back to work. He'd feel his way along the wires.

Life without insurance whittles you down-literally in the case of a carpenter Mueller treated. Self-employed full time, he couldn't afford insurance. When he came into the hospital with bloody urine and uncontrolled blood sugar, they found a tumor. He refused surgery because he couldn't pay for it.
Six months later, he accidentally cut off his thumb. The cancer was worse now and, because of his thumb, he couldn't work. He agreed to the cancer surgery, which was now more extensive and expensive. Unable to pay the bill, he received regular calls from a collection agency. His untreated diabetes caused a foot infection, so his toes had to be amputated, which added another bill to the stack.
Sometimes he'd get free medicine for his diabetes. Sometimes he'd take it. Other times he'd ration it. His vision worsened. One kidney failed and was removed. They discovered another cancer-this one in his bladder. Then he was forced to say "goodbye" to his bladder.
A few months later, his family found him lying on his floor from a stroke-a complication of uncontrolled diabetes. Nearly blind and stroke-disabled, missing several toes, a thumb, one kidney, his bladder and his home, he now qualified for Medicaid. His other kidney began to fail, so he was put on dialysis. He shared a nursing-home room with four other men when he died six months shy of being eligible for Medicare.

In the end, defaulting the uninsured to emergency rooms costs more than insuring them and is one reason, according to Mueller, U.S. health-care costs are so high compared to those of other countries. The United States, for example, spends $4,000 per capita, twice as much as Canada and almost twice as much as Germany, both of which insure all its citizens. "We know it's cheaper to provide universal coverage," Richter says. "Instead of paying for insurance, we should pay for care and stop filtering the money through expensive insurance overhead. Instead, we have competing entities vying for the healthy and ignoring the 10 percent who generate 70 percent of health-care costs."

What's all this from?
From a report published in 2000.
What's changed since then?
Oh, it's gotten worse.
Fabulous.
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