How the Other Half Heals

This essay by Teri Reynolds is short. I thought she could have done more with it, but her point I think is made: poor Americans do not receive adequate healthcare, and this fact leads, in many cases, to premature death.

Reynolds points out that unequal health care providers are located just a few miles apart in some cities. City and county hospitals are plagued by inadequate facilities while university hospitals or private-owned hospitals are well equipped. This should be news to no one, right? Well, it isn't any more than the idea that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is a new saying. What makes Reynold's piece timely, when it was published anyway, is that the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party were fighting for the passage of health care reform. Reynolds, we might say, was doing her part, not to encourage support of the bill--she says that she was against the compromised bill since she wanted nothing less than universal coverage--but to awaken Americans to the fact and consequences of health care disparities.

The question is why we accept these disparities, especially when we realize that the real consequence of them is shorter life spans for Americans who don't have the range of health care options open to people with health insurance. Interestingly, Reynolds ends her piece, not with the awful stories of the clients at the charity hospital but with a story of an insured patient at her new hospital. His perception was that he too, when visiting an emergency room, had to bleed in order to be seen. Isn't this an example of chickens coming home to roost? I think Reynolds is suggesting that what insured Americans do to the least of these, i.e. ignore them, will eventually be done to them.