Death In The ER

Originally posted by M.G. DeQuincy Hall

During my workday I learned searchers had found the body of 5-year-old Shaniya Davis in North Carolina, and I’d planned to opine about a mother who would sell her child into prostitution, the monster that would buy her and the sickening pervert eventually responsible for killing her.

Querying news sites to get more information about that case, I happened to see an article about how uninsured patients visiting our nation’s emergency rooms were twice (yes, two times) as likely to die as their counterparts with insurance.

Long ago in the early nineties, Public Enemy alerted us all that something was amiss, as Flavor Flav intoned that 911 was “a joke.” Ice Cube walked us through an excursion to the L.A. County hospital where negroes, “die over a little scratch.”

On our journey growing up in Seattle, we have all heard or talked about the fear involved with a trip to Harborview Medical Center, lest we not make the return trip home, even as it has been touted as the region’s best trauma center. I have always been of the mind that even if the uninsured (read: poor) did not have access to, and therefore did not receive adequate or regular preventative care like annual physicals, necessary medications, etc., we would all be on a level playing field when it came to emergency treatment when we were in need after car accidents, falls, shootings and the like. Apparently I was wrong.

Very interesting that researchers from Harvard University looked at information on almost 700,000 patients from 900 hospitals across the nation during a period from 2002 through 2006 and concluded that the ER death rate for those with insurance had a death rate of 3.3 percent compared with 5.7 percent for the uninsured.

Enigmatically enough, the study was not able to identify the reasons (there are several possible theories), the numbers are clear, frightening and not all that different than what we all in the city have suspected if not known for generations; if you’re poor, stay out of the hospital-it may not be the best place for you.

Since President Obama rode into the White House amidst a promise to reform health care in the U.S, among other things. That reform bill has been passed in the house and is now being debated in the senate. In earlier stages, conservatives tried to derail reform by claiming President Light Brown and his cohorts were trying to push death panels onto the elderly. That clearly was not the case, but these numbers have me wondering if our public hospitals have not been staffed with death squads. Until this whole reform thing is resolved in congress, I would advise whether insured or not that you use a little more caution when driving, and if you hear gunshots–duck.
-DQ