Who Tells the Dead Patient Stories Now?

[NorthCarolina]

by Donna Smith
CommonDreams.org

Since the health insurance reform bill passed this past spring, you’d think we suddenly stopped having American patients die and suffer unimaginable horror at the hands of the corporate owned and operated healthcare business system in the United States. No one tells the stories. The reality is that patients were props, and they just aren’t needed as props any more.

An estimated 45,000 preventable deaths occurring in these United States annually due to the lack of access to appropriate healthcare marches on. That does not account for those dead from other preventable causes like medical error. 45,000 every year. That’s 123 dead every day. Today’s dead: 123. Have you seen that reported anywhere? Yesterday’s dead? 123. Any reports? Tomorrow’s dead? 123. Is anyone trying to save those pending dead?

Though more Americans die preventable deaths every day without access to healthcare right here at home than die in weeks on any foreign battlefield, no one is searching for them in the wilderness of greed and profit-driven medicine. No one needs their painful realities right now.

123 Dead today.

<---snip--->

There are those who still clamor for real transformation of the U.S. healthcare system from the for-profit model to a social insurance model like extending and improving Medicare for all. But even many of those people have somehow decided that it’s only the money arguments that need to be made – only the profit-takers who need convincing with the language of more profit and fortunes still to be made.

I disagree. I think someone must have the courage to keep reporting the healthcare war dead. In fact, I believe their faces and their names ought to be more prominent as we go forward as measures of what we are allowing to be done to our fellow human beings in this nation.

123 dead yesterday. 123 dead today. 123 yet to die tomorrow. Since the passage of the health insurance reform bill in March 2010, 14,670 American patients are dead. And no one spoke their names. The day we become a nation that turns its back on that much death and suffering is the day we have lost much more than a political battle -- we’ve lost our collective soul.

Donna Smith is a community organizer for National Nurses United (the new national arm of the California Nurses Association) and National Co-Chair for the Progressive Democrats of America Healthcare Not Warfare campaign.

Link: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/27-0

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This really begs the question, what are our priorities in this country? Unlimited funding for unending war, while suffering and despair proliferates at home. Billions upon billions squandered in, or lost in, Iraq and Afghanistan, and for what? What have we gained. Do any of us feel safer? The only thing that aggravates me more than the situation we are in, is the fact that our party, the Democratic Party, has lost it's soul to the DLC New Dems who conspire with the GOP and moneyed interests in this country to maintain the status quo. Nothing will change until the soul of the party is cleansed.

This is truly a great article by Donna Smith. I hope that many of you will take the time to read it.

[midnight]

1. These unreported crimes are an embarrassment to the new

business model in American-money trumps peace.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

2. The Administrators get bonuses based on "money saved".

The less money they spend, the bigger the bonus....................