Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
Thomas Duncan, the Liberian national who died of Ebola in a Dallas, TX, hospital a few days ago, was sent home from that hospital’s emergency room the first time he appeared there despite having a 103°F fever and other symptoms of Ebola and telling the emergency room staff he had just come from Africa. Despite those red lights flashing, he was sent home with antibiotics. According to the the hospital, not admitting him then resulted from a communications failure.
But was the alleged communications failure the real reason he was turned away? Or is that just the hospital’s cover story for turning him away because he was black and/or he had no health insurance?
According to stories in the Huffington Post and Bloomberg News, Duncan had no health insurance:
Duncan had many of the characteristics which data consistently show are likely to result in disparate treatment: lack of insurance, black, foreign nationality and (likely) an accent. [Huffington Post]
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Duncan came to the U.S. from Liberia on Sept. 20 on a tourist visa. He had no health insurance to pay for his care, said the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the civil rights advocate, who traveled to Dallas at the request of Duncan’s mother.
Spokesmen for Texas Health Presbyterian and for the Liberian embassy in Washington declined to discuss who would pay for Duncan’s care. [Bloomberg]
At some point, the truth on the Dallas hospital’s decision not to admit Duncan despite his presentation of symptoms consistent with Ebola will emerge. But the mere fact that issue has been raised illuminates a serious flaw in our health care system that was slightly reduced but far from eliminated by the Affordable Care Act:
There are still people in this country who are uninsured. Even if fully implemented as intended — an impossibility, given the Supreme Court’s decision that expanding Medicaid is optional — tens of millions would be left without insurance. And as long as people are not insured, hospitals and other components of our health care system will find ways to avoid treating these people.
Only an everyone covered for everything federal single-payer health care system paid for through progressive taxes can ensure that cost won’t be a factor in decisions on ministering to the Thomas Duncans of this world. That’s the conclusion we should be drawing from this affair.