Re: The Shock Doctrine in Action in New Orleans

[Csubstance@aol.com]

12/26/07

Colleagues and friends:

Our current medical industry is causing suffering which is all the more 
horrifying because so much of it is preventable. There is no excuse for the kinds 
of treatment being meted out to poor people -- many of them children or the 
very old -- in this country today except a philosophy that was ugly and subject 
to denunciation as early as 180 years ago by Charles Dickens. And the fact is, 
we've reverted to that ugliness in the past 20 or 25 years, as the 
simultaneous advanced in medical technology in the USA have run alongside with the 
invention of the most ugly forms of unregulated industrial for profit medicine.

Lately, I've been experiencing this first hand, and in the coming years many 
more once "middle class" white people will doubtless be experiencing the same. 
My most recent experience with this Dickensian monster came at the hands of 
the Sisters of the Resurrection and their Emergency Room on Chicago's Northwest 
Side.

I can't imagine anything worse than the current system of health care in the 
USA, except possibly no health care at all, and recently I've been 
experiencing it first hand.

My family recently transferred to the Illinois "All Kids" program after 
paying COBRA for five months (at $1,400 per month!) following the elimination of 
several jobs at SEIU Local 73, where I had been Director of Research, last May 
and June. I'm still looking for a new job.

Three weeks ago, I got a small splinter carrying firewood. Although I thought 
it was out, it wasn't, and the tip of my index finger (right hand) became 
infected. Between doctors (you have to choose a new doctor from a list), I went 
to the Emergency Room at the nearest hospital, Resurrection (Belmont and 
Central in Chicago).

The first day of my wait, with a throbbing finger and barely able to "work" 
(typing and editing being my main work right now), I had to wait nearly four 
hours, and was told that the triage line was as long or longer than when I came 
in. I had completed the paperwork (by the way, they don't give you a copy of 
all the waivers you sign -- just requiring that you sign the fourth page of 
four pages, which are in English).

The second day I went back, with the infection now swollen to about a quarter 
inch, and a visible pustule. The pain was enormous (if you've had a broken or 
infected finger, you know what I'm talking about). 

I arrived there at around six p.m. and got back home (less than a mile away) 
at around 1:00 a.m.

One of the nurses told me that the staffing was deliberate. "We have two 
doctors and four nurses on duty, and with this load we should have six doctors and 
twelve nurses..." So my wait (over two days, it was between nine and ten 
hours; I didn't begin counting until it became interesting from the point of view 
of investigative reporting, which is one of the things I do) is built into the 
system that Resurrection oversees. 

They have more security people on duty in and around the emergency room than 
doctors to treat the patients who come in. As I sat there, hour after hour, it 
became obvious why. Most of the people who come into emergency rooms like 
that are very young (sick children) or older -- neither of whom can do much more 
than suffer the long waits. But a percentage of those people are young and 
fairly strong. I sat for a couple of hours talking with a woman who had a bad 
slice out of her hand from working at McDonald's. Others injured on jobs ranging 
from construction to fast foods (we have a lot of nonunion construction work 
going on in Chicago nowadays).

When it came to my turn, all they had to do was freeze the finger, lance the 
infection, and tell me to put Bactitracin on it for a week. No prescription 
for anything in case the infection continued. Just a "Come back if it gets 
worse." And almost nothing in writing, including how to spell the antibiotic 
ointment I was supposed to get at the nearest drug store when I got out of there 
between midnight and one a.m.

Our unregulated capitalist "market driven" medical is causing an enormous 
amount of suffering. I watched little children shivering with fever sit for 
hours, while their mothers tried to wrangle two or three other little children as 
the hours moved closer and closer to midnight. As a former teacher, I wondered 
whether anyone in that family would get to school the following morning. And 
in what shape to meet what "standards" based on what kind of accountability. 

There were other touches, too numerous to mention, but two I'll never forget.

The first night, someone had urinated in the corner. When I arrived, I told 
the people at "the desk." When I left (after more than three hours) no one had 
cleaned and disinfected that corner. The smell was, if anything, worse than 
when I had arrived.

As I was leaving, after finally getting my infection lanced, I noticed that 
the sign on Central Ave. talked about the "mission" of the "Sisters of the 
Resurrection" who run that hospital (and a few others in Chicago).

You don't want to hear what I was mumbling to myself as I went to my car to 
look for a 24-hour pharmacy to get the ointment that may or may not have 
prevented the infection from returning. With nothing in writing to tell me what to 
get.

One other conclusion. The only reason there is not more Dickensian narration 
of these horrors is that most of the people who are suffering them are poor 
and either not white or immigrants. While English was spoken during the nine or 
ten hours I spent at Resurrection's ER, it was third or fourth spoken by the 
patients, after Spanish and Polish. There were also a couple of people speaking 
what sounded like Arabic. In the current medical system in the USA, as 
practiced by the Sisters of the Resurrection at their Emergency Room ten days before 
Christmas 2007, the duty of the poor is to suffer in silence while their 
understaffed -- but well patrolled by security -- ER grinds them further down. 

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

www.substancenews.net  

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