Last night Frontline did a follow up to Sick Around the World called Sick Around America. It seemed that much has changed in public television reporting between the two productions. The first one seemed influenced by Michael Moore and the second seemed to tell AHIP's side of the story. Now the only answer given was comprehensive health insurance.
There were few stories that go beyond the shallow politician's descriptions of escalating health care cost, government budgets, people's bankruptcies, lost homes, and small businesses closing their doors while corporations are shipping jobs overseas.
But there was one story that should be repeated. Monique "Nikki" White is just one of the 101,000 Americans who die each year because of American health care. The final words of her physician were;
Nikki didn't die from lupus. Nikki died secondary to the complications of a failing health care system.
When she was 21 Monique White known as Nikki learned she had lupus. She was still in college at the time. After leaving school she no longer had health care on her parennts' plan so she found jobs that provided coverage until 2001 when her lupus became worse. Nikki was forced to move back to her parents Tennessee home. She had no health insurance and her parents could not afford the rapidly escalating medical cost.
Nikki had given up her dream of becoming a doctor to disease but her doctor Amylyn Crawford, who pointed out that lupus can usually be treated, described someone who still had hopes and dreams.
I think one of the great things, as being a physician is finding a patient or individual who is invested in understanding their disease, their disease process and really wanting to take control, and be responsible for their own health. Nikki was absolutely one of those individuals
It did not work out the way it would in any other developed nation. Outside of the the employer based health care system, the for profit individual plans would not cover her. Because of illness Nikki was considered uninsureable. So in 2003 Nikki secured coverage with TennCare, the Tenseness Medicaid plan. But in 2005 after state budget cuts Tenseness threw Nikki off their state plan for the poor and disabled. This left her unable to get the needed help of specialist that could have saved her life.
Over the next few months, sick and scared, Nikki appealed her case in letters describing her desperate situation. But she got nowhere.
Her condition worsened. In November of 2005 with pancreatitis and failing kidneys she was rushed to the emergency room of Bristol Regional Medical Center.
Over the next ten weeks she underwent twenty-six operations to remove dead tissue from her internal organs, racking up nearly $900,000 in medical bill she couldn't possibly pay.
Then she learned of a very expensive private insurance policy with a very high deductible that federal law guarantees to people who have been thrown off Medicaid and with this policy was transferred to Duke University hospital for further surgery. But her disease was too advanced and in May of 2006, thirty-two year old Nikki White died.
Ironically, eight days later TennCare sent a letter. There had been a mistake. They should not have told Nikki she'd bee thrown off Medicaid after all.
A system where they won't treat you because you are destitute and don't have insurance that you can't get but then they will treat you when it's too late because it would be inhumane at that point?
Dr. Amylyn Crawford also said;
I'm not afraid to say it. I believe in my heart that if Nikki had not lost her insurance she would be alive today. I find it highly ironic that a society that denied her health care then all of a sudden spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for her to be in the intensive care unit and to undergo all of these treatments and all of these interventions that still failed to be able to heal her and let her have the life that she really needed.
Then the narrator offered the claim "According to a study by the National Academy of Sciences around 20,000 Americans die each year because they can't get the health care they need" and went to Karen Ignagni the president and CEO of AHIP for answers.
But there is another study that comes up with the much worse number of 101,000 preventable deaths per year in the U.S.A. and the question that bthespoon asked.
That's a large jet liner full of 277 people going down each and every day. Can you imagine a jetliner full of 277 Americans crashing every day after day and us thinking that the problem could wait a year or two to be solved?
So Nikki was one of those 227 people per day and it is just so tragic in the richest nation in the world.