🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <27o4b9$o2q@agate.berkeley.edu> newman@garnet.berkeley.edu (Nathan Newman) writes:

>Secondly, go to any county hospital and you will see lines of people
>waiting for EMERGENCY care.  This is the difference: in Canada, they make
>sure that everyone gets emergency care immediately and occasionaly make
>people wait a little for non-emergency care.  
>
>In the US, the rich and powerful get immediate care for anything they
>need even if not an emergency, while the poor have to wait even for
>emergency care and never receive preventive care.


I will second this strongly.  I have a dear friend who has always been a
very productive, hard working American citizen.  A couple of years ago she
was crippled by an accident, and less than a year later was diagnosed with
colon cancer at the relatively young age of 43.

The harrowing, degrading, and disgusting experiences she has been through
simply to fight for basic, competent medical care for her ailments has
been an absolute nightmare.  The system of disbursing these "benefits" seems
to be, on the whole, primarily designed to frustrate, demean, and 
discourage potential "beneficiaries".  I don't have the space to go into
details here but believe me, I could write a book.

Here's a person who, by any sane measure, should be spending all of her
energies trying to recover -- who has been forced to seek full-time 
employment (only endurable with powerful pain-killers) due to the fact that
A) They won't give her disability benefits (or they ran out) B) she no 
longer has health insurance C) General Assistance (welfare) won't pay the
bills.  All the while, keeping all of this secret from her employer out
of abject fear that they will find a way to fire her if they find out. (and
she has a discrimination suit pending against one such employer, who most
of you are familiar with (and may have worked for)... but of course it may
be years before anything is resolved with that.

Yeah, damn right it's about time to reform this inhuman travesty we call 
"Health Care".  Let's do it NOW.



Phil Koenig
pjk@netcom.com