Anyone without health insurance can find help. It's messy, convoluted, involves charity of one sort or another, and surely must strip the pride from those who find themselves in that circumstance.
Low income, uninsured people can even get prescriptions filled directly from a pharmaceutical. Each company has a program for that and dispenses a lot of medication to people with chronic illnesses. I've helped several people do this.
It's not a good system but the notion that people are dying in the streets is just wrong.
The biggest problem is not knowing where to go and how to get things done. Last fall I spent a fair amount of time helping two people come up with ways to mitigate the hardship they had because they were going into the donut hole for prescription drugs. In both cases, they were helped greatly by doing things they could have figured out themselves if they hadn't been so helpless by nature. They were substantially helped simply by switching some prescriptions to the $10/90 day Wal-Mart plan and paying those out-of-pocket. Other prescriptions saved money by putting them in a mail-order plan, Medco. And a couple were switchable to generic. I was happy to do the work for them, but at the same time stuff like this is kind of depressing.
I know you think I'm uncharitable by nature and that's OK. The fact is that I've done considerable charity work in my community (non-church related) as well as in my church. The sad facts are this. Most people end up in a sorry state not by accident, but because of poor decisions. They squander their opportunities for a good life, their money, and their health because they make bad choices. Big choices and little choices. Things as small as someone who would rather read a tabloid than read commonsense ways to take care of their own health. How much can and should society take care of these people is the big question.
It's too rosy of you to assume that giving everyone health insurance will automatically have great outcomes. People will still squander their health on drugs, alcohol, obesity, poor diet, etc. Some won't even go to the doctor unless someone else makes the appointment and drives them there. Some people honestly can't be helped. They have to hit a point where they're desparate enough to find the wherewithal to turn their lives around themselves. |
