A few days ago my daughter, a physician serving largely the uninsured, came home emotionally drained from a typical day at the office. Most of her afternoon’s patients were seriously ill, facing expensive, complex care, and needlessly so. They had come into such poor health because of inadequate management of chronic conditions and mostly it was due to their inability to pay.
One of the day’s patients was a man in his forties who had been diagnosed with high blood pressure four years prior. Uninsured, he received inconsistent treatment for his condition, leading to a heart attack two years later. The attack precipitated heroic emergency room and then hospital treatments, free to him but expensive to the rest of us, including placement of a stent; however, with the immediate crisis over, lack of money for drugs led once again to gap-filled care. Key in his follow-up care should have been the drug Plavix, considered critical for avoiding clotting after stents, but he couldn’t afford it so he stopped taking it ten months too early. Now, just two years later, he’s developed severe high blood pressure that has damaged both his heart and kidney. Our medical system will provide him once again with heroic and very expensive hospital care, all of which likely could have been avoided if proper health care insurance had enabled his condition to be systematically managed for the past two years. The system as a whole, and likely government funding in particular, will end up paying hundreds of times more because his care was so poorly managed. Of course, we’re also losing a potentially productive man all the while, if not forever.
Every week we bring you a video from Health 2.0! This week we’re featuring a golden oldie, David Kibbe’s motorcycle tour across America.
