Spent most of the day at Illinois Masonic Hospital, in waiting rooms. Nothing to worry about, but blog posts might be a little infrequent for a few days (not me, my Sig O if you really must know, but I have to be nursemaid until Monday). While reading my book, I overheard a heartbreaking conversation between a doctor, a nurse, and the mother of an infant. The nurse was translating the doctor's sentences into Spanish. One phrase in particular pierced me: "If you had had this surgery when your doctor first told you to have it, your son's eyes would have recovered 90 percent of their vision, but now the best we can hope for is 10 percent vision".
Unspoken - but obvious to all five of us in the room - the working class mother with shoes worn nearly to the nub (possibly an undocumented resident afraid of deportation) could not afford to visit the hospital until now, and because of that, her boy's degenerative eye disease is going to render the boy nearly blind his entire life.
And yet, over a billion dollars in cash disappeared without a trace in Iraq, and billions more are pissed away in the sand every day. But one kid becoming blind because his parents couldn't afford health care? Not at all important to the faux-Christian fuckers who control how our tax dollars are spent.
It's a shame and it happens all the time. Let's hope things change after the elections.
My story is one of a child, my son, with health insurance of the HMO kind. That means overworked doctor playing musical patient rooms. GHR had strabismus. We learned, well after the fact, his surgery, done when he was six months old, should have been performed before he was three mos. old so he'd have three-dimensional vision.
At some point I got pissed off and switched us all to PPO, where you pay 80% of visits, etc.
GHR had a visit with another ophtalmologist three years ago. This one suggested eye exercises at a doctor out of reach by bus. That was sometime in 2004. Now, in 2007, this same ophtalmologist conducts an eye-dilation test to find GHR's vision is 20/40. In the meantime, GHR is considered a perfect-vision student in testing at the school district. No accommodations for this baby.
In search for better health care we are faced with huge bills that make us fear for our mortgage payments. 'Tis the season, falalala...