Who Tells the Dead Patient Stories Now?

Since the health insurance reform bill passed this past
spring, you'd think we suddenly stopped having American patients die and
suffer unimaginable horror at the hands of the corporate owned and operated
healthcare business system in the United States. No one tells the
stories. The reality is that patients were props, and they just aren't
needed as props any more.

An estimated 45,000 preventable deaths occurring in
these United States annually due to the lack of access to appropriate
healthcare marches on. That does not account for those dead from other
preventable causes like medical error. 45,000 every year.
That's 123 dead every day. Today's dead: 123. Have you
seen that reported anywhere? Yesterday's dead? 123. Any
reports? Tomorrow's dead? 123. Is anyone trying to save
those pending dead?

Though more Americans die preventable deaths every day
without access to healthcare right here at home than die in weeks on any
foreign battlefield, no one is searching for them in the wilderness of greed
and profit-driven medicine. No one needs their painful realities right
now.

123 Dead today.

Patient stories were used as props by elected officials, mainstream
and alternative media members and groups, advocacy groups and think
tanks. Relatives of dead patients made especially good fodder for the
debates. Moms and dads of dead kids were prime targets to stand up on
stages, sit at witness tables and have their names and details of the
loved-one's death shared with the world. Cancer patients who
could not access care were pretty valuable too. If they could still
stand, think and talk, cancer patients made for great photo-ops for all and
better fundraising tools for others.

123 dead tomorrow.

Some may say this is to be understood as the nation has
moved on to other issues following the passage of the health insurance bail-out
bill - we are now worried about jobs, the oil spill, the Arizona
immigration bigotry, the leak of documents on the Afghan war. All
critical issues to be sure. Some may add that we'll just have to wait and
see if those numbers drop in 2014 or 2016 or 2018 as parts of the health
insurance reform bill unfold

123 dead yesterday. Those insistent dead just don't
stop dying. They aren't waiting for a third political party to
emerge. They are the dead and the dying.

Patients are dying and suffering every single day in larger
numbers even as the weeks of recession roll on and medical providers become
even more tightly controlled about uncompensated and undercompensated care
- meaning they are protecting their bottom lines too and uncompensated
care is the term used for patients who come without any means of payment or
with inadequate means of payment. Patients are suffering more, not
less. Payments are demanded up front. Patients cannot pay the
thousands or even the hundreds required for treatment. More death, not
less.

123 people today will not die pretty, gentle, fade away in
their sleep deaths with tearful loved ones at their sides. They may have
spent weeks or even months begging for someone to treat them. They may
have been working even weeks ago or days ago but unable to get past the co-pay
and deductibles of their insurance to get early treatment and unable to slack
off for even one moment on their jobs lest an opportunistic employer decide to
lay people off based on unspoken measures of value, like use of sick time for
doctor visits. They will die after arguments and struggles with those
they leave behind as the financial pressures mounted and their illnesses
deepened.

I searched every news outlet page I could find to see if
anyone was reporting on yesterday's dead. No one did. 123
people died, and few people even noticed their passing. I searched to see
if anyone was reporting the impending slaughter of 123 innocents in the United
States today, and no one is reporting on it.

Along with the 45,000 dead, we allowed 700,000 patients and
their families to go belly-up financially in 2009. In the U.S., medical crisis
leads to more than 50 percent of the personal bankruptcies (and of those
patients, 75 percent had health insurance). So, as we saw personal
bankruptcy filings rise 31.9 percent overall in 2009, we also added more
patients and their families into our deadbeat files. Even if those folks
get well physically, we'll punish them forever for having gone
broke. Bankruptcy bruised credit takes years to repair.

123 dead today. 1,917 going broke today in the midst of
medical crisis. In this nation. Yet no one reports. No one.

The one thing I know for sure is that the patient horror
stories were certainly an integral part of the fuel that moved any debate on
health reform to take place at all. The dead and dying made for a better
frame for press pieces than simply selling health reform as a way to bail out
the private, for-profit health insurance industry and bolster the
medical-industrial complex overall. Patients are necessary in this system
and in the debate only to the extent that without them you cannot run the
engines of medical profit.

123 dead. 1,917 in financial collapse. Homes
lost. Futures torn apart. And no one reports.

There are those who still clamor for real transformation of
the U.S. healthcare system from the for-profit model to a social insurance
model like extending and improving Medicare for all. But even many of
those people have somehow decided that it's only the money arguments that
need to be made - only the profit-takers who need convincing with the
language of more profit and fortunes still to be made.

I disagree. I think someone must have the courage to
keep reporting the healthcare war dead. In fact, I believe their faces
and their names ought to be more prominent as we go forward as measures of what
we are allowing to be done to our fellow human beings in this nation.

123 dead yesterday. 123 dead today. 123 yet to
die tomorrow. Since the passage of the health insurance reform bill in
March 2010, 14,670 American patients are dead. And no one spoke their
names. The day we become a nation that turns its back on that much
death and suffering is the day we have lost much more than a political battle
-- we've lost our collective soul.