Sunday, August 23, 2009

Death panels! II

From the U.K.’s Guardian website:

Such scaremongering [at town hall meetings and elsewhere] has dismayed and infuriated Sharon Lee, the doctor who now treats Manley [a physician with Huntington’s disease who lost his practice and his own health insurance] in Kansas City. "I'm very angry, very angry," she says. "Many of the people I treat have already been in front of a death panel and have lost – a death panel controlled by insurance companies. I see people dying at least monthly because we have been unable to get them what they needed." [italics are Spot’s]

The article features Dr. Lee’s clinic in Kansas. It’s a very good read. Here’s another couple of paragraphs from the article:

[Dr. Lee] rattles off a litany of horror stories. There was the man who walked into the clinic with a brain tumour [British spelling]. It took Lee three months to get him an MRI scan and another two to get an appointment with a neurosurgeon. Or the patient whose nerves in his neck were pushed against his spinal cord so that he lost use of both arms; by the time Lee found a way of getting him an MRI he was so sick he had to be operated on immediately. Or the woman who had such heavy periods she would wind up in ER every three months requiring a blood transfusion. What she really needed was a hysterectomy. "It took us almost a year to beg hospitals until she finally did get a hysterectomy," Lee says.

These are the stories, the broken lives, that have been obscured by the fury generated by the Republican rump. Unless Obama finds a way to regain the political initiative, to remind Americans that only nine months ago they voted overwhelmingly for change, then the future of millions appears bleak. [italics are Spot’s]

A thump of the tail to truthout.org.

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