People or Profits?
In Almeda County, a private hospital turned away a woman in labor because the
hospital's computer showed that she didn't have insurance. Hours later, her baby
was born dead in a county hospital. In San Bernardino, a hospital surgeon sent a
patient who had been stabbed in the heart to a county medical center after
examining him and declaring his condition stable. The patient arrived at the
county medical center dying, he suffered a cardiac arrest, and died. These two
hospitals shifted these patients to county facilities not for medical reasons,
but for economic ones -- the receiving hospitals feared they wouldn't be paid
for treating the patient. What's right? People or profit? Should there be
death or tragedy at the result of poverty and high health care costs, or should
a business such as a hospital lose millions everyday to give health care to
those who can't afford it? An average person like me would feel for the person
who could not afford sufficient health insurance, and as in the case above, the
baby inside that mother's womb didn't choose its financial situation, or its
parents. That baby didn't ask to be born, and it wasn't given a chance to live.
It wasn't necessarily the doctors fault, and it wasn't even his or her decision,
because of business. Business has moved to the heart of health care, a place
once relatively cushioned from the pursuit of profit that drives the rest of the
U.S. economy. Throughout the history of the United States, medical institutions
have largely been non-profit establishments existing primarily to serve the
community. But during the past 20 years, the number of for-profit health care
facilities ...