I wondered a lot about it, before I had insurance thanks to Obamacare I was subjected last year in Arizona to a very similar situation, (very weird symptoms, one usually does get a flu or sore throat gradually, in my case it came like if someone had given me a sudden kick in the neck) so I did go to the emergency room in a nearby hospital, very crowded indeed, with needy people. After a long conversation with a nurse that made sure to let me know that I needed to sign paperwork that in essence would leave my family in the poor house if this was a very serious issue, I decided to once again (Yeah, there was another time in my past that I had no health insurance and somehow survived a very serious internal bleeding) risk it and go home, luckily the anger that I had made me notice that I was felling better with my neck so it seemed to be a good gamble.
I was lucky but this guy was not.
I would not be surprised that a lot of pressure to not hospitalize poor or uninsured people is one bit that many nurses or front office people do get training for, unlike getting training to be really ready for an epidemic. This IMHO is specially the case on states that have opposed health care reform.
Luckier than you know. Mrs. Plant (v.2.0) decided she was dying, and after signing in at the ER became bored and went home. I was out several hundred dollars, despite her having insurance.
That is an opinionated account and not supported by the stated facts that the hospital fucked up in sending him home the first time. Never attribute to malice what can be accounted for by stupidity. That doesn’t make it right, but I have a hard time believing Duncan was sent home with antibiotics because of racism. In my opinion, people cave in to Jackson because he is a loudmouthed blowhard with a soapbox and a good eye for publicity.
As for his not being given the experimental treatment, it was an unproven drug with no guarantee it would have any results. There were probably good sound medical reasons for doing so. At this point, there is no cure for Ebola. The best treatment is to provide supportive care while the patient fights off the infection. There is no magic bullet for Ebola.
Did not think so either, but poverty does explain a lot, and it was one of the reasons they mentioned. (I also do think that poverty was the issue in my case too, but knowing how lot of the efforts against health care reform have a racist component I can not agree that we should eliminate racism that a factor completely).
In any case I was not talking about it, the only thing it is clear that you missed the main point, the family was being treated like dirt, and in a case like that I would even accept the help of Fox’s Hannity in pressuring an organization that is not doing the proper thing.
And I can see that there is no magic bullet to prejudice, and in this case it is mostly an economical one.
So, you believe the hospital knowingly sent Duncan home with antibiotics in spite of having symptoms of Ebola because he was poor and black when the right thing to do would have been to hospitalize him and put him into quarantine, if only to prevent the spread of infection to the general public? :rolleyes: Alrighty, then. I’ll say again, never attribute to malice that which can be accounted for by stupidity. Again, human error. Regrettable, but not motivated by racism. If you believe the hospital’s error was malicious in nature, you have to believe they also had a disregard for the rest of the public who would have had reason to come into contact with Duncan.
Not really, my position is more nuanced than the caricature you want to make.
Curiously I also do consider the error angle, but I do think that, just like in the case I encountered in Phoenix, there are more prone to error when they are trained to discourage poor people to get treatment.
Sorry, on this one you can not change what I experienced, and it is interesting that to make your incomplete and caricature points you are also ignoring what I did go through, and the experiences of many others when there is no good health access for the uninsured.
I already did so in my note to PastTense, but to deal more with it:
I guess I have to deal with where the malice is IMHO:
No, I did not see any malice on the eyes of the nice lady/nurse that discouraged me from getting treatment when I thought I needed to last year.
I got the impression that she was also concerned about my health indeed; but there was, besides the health forms filled, the problem of me not having insurance then, it was similar to watching a car salesman (sales woman) discouraging you from going to a different dealer.
So it was clear to me that the risk was too much in the economical sense, as it happens with many poor people it would not matter much if I had died in my sleep if I had had a really bad condition, as I got out I did thank her for her attention but I let her know that this was not really a good thing, and could see that she mostly did agree and was concerned by the choice I made. Indeed I did not see any malice, nor incompetency even, she was just very capable and competently trained on discouraging a poor guy with no insurance from getting treatment.
Can not blame her anyhow, as I was aware that nurses associations are fighting to avoid having to make those discouraging efforts that are prone to cause mistakes, particularly when epidemics rear their ugly microscopic but deadly heads. (And if I was correct on my assessment of what the nurse/staff person was thinking, this discouraging way of dealing with the poor and uninsured is a soul crushing effort for them).
I like to think that she was part of groups like the ANA:
So where is the malice? I would think that the evidence shows that it is coming from politicians that should know better, from powerful groups that still want to prevent any reform from taking place, from the medical bean counters that impose those practices to the staff in a hospital; but then again, they could also be mostly incompetent…
Either way, they do not deserve to be returned to congress.
This whole thing has already entered the “Chicken Little” stage. There was an article in the paper about how the Chicago marathon is preparing for ebola. Despite the fact that there are no participants from West Africa (there are a number from East Africa, and god-dammit those dirty foreigners must be bringing the plague). There’s a BBC article about this becoming “the next AIDS”. Ebola will not be the next AIDS. It will not be the next malaria. It will not be the next flu. It might be the next African sleeping sickness, although that kills about 9,000 people a year, and I sort of doubt ebola is going to hit that sort of toll on a regular basis.
The only place this disease is spreading is in an area which recently had a civil war and has very little in the way of medical infrastructure. It is perfectly safe to shake the hand of those tourists from Senegal. Your kid who goes to school in Dallas is not at risk. Medical workers are at a slight risk, just like they are for every other nasty disease out there.
And now one of his nurses has come down with Ebola… how on earth did that happen! She was gowned, gloved, masked - and of course, this freak occurrence is going to make people even more crazy.
Even though she asked for privacy and for her name not to be released, the media outed her anyway.
Poor thing. She’s just a nurse, doing her job, and now she’s going to be the public face of this disease in the United States - maybe for her whole life; however long that happens to be.
How a gowned and gloved person can become infected has been addressed in numerous forums, but to say it again, in a nutshell, when you are removing a garment that is contaminated on the outside unless you do it exactly right you risk exposing yourself to the contagion. Taking the protective garments off is when a person is most likely to make a mistake.
Or maybe a small hole was torn in the garments.
Or maybe she suffered a needlestick through a glove.
These sorts of things happen every day in medicine, that’s how even careful doctors can catch things like HIV and hepatitis and so on.
I already did so in my note to PastTense, but to deal more with it: