A Preview Of Socialized Medicine

by John Hawkins | May 12, 2008 9:00 am

The WAPO has done a piece[1] that is supposed to be a damning indictment of the type of care captured illegals get before they’re deported. Personally, I think it reads better as a preview of what would happen if the Democrats got their way and socialized medicine came to pass.

Just take a look at what happens when the government, an organization with the compassion of the IRS, the efficiency of the DMV, and the raw, steely confidence of FEMA takes charge of people’s health care,

Near midnight on a California spring night, armed guards escorted Yusif Osman into an immigration prison ringed by concertina wire at the end of a winding, isolated road.

During the intake screening, a part-time nurse began a computerized medical file on Osman, a routine procedure for any person entering the vast prison network the government has built for foreign detainees across the country. But the nurse pushed a button and mistakenly closed file #077-987-986 and marked it “completed” — even though it had no medical information in it.

Three months later, at 2 in the morning on June 27, 2006, the native of Ghana collapsed in Cell 206 at the Otay Mesa immigrant detention center outside San Diego. His cellmate hit the intercom button, yelling to guards that Osman was on the floor suffering from chest pains. A guard peered through the window into the dim cell and saw the detainee on the ground, but did not go in. Instead, he called a clinic nurse to find out whether Osman had any medical problems.

When the nurse opened the file and found it blank, she decided there was no emergency and said Osman needed to fill out a sick call request. The guard went on a lunch break.

The cellmate yelled again. Another guard came by, looked in and called the nurse. This time she wanted Osman brought to the clinic. Forty minutes passed before guards brought a wheelchair to his cell. By then it was too late: Osman was barely alive when paramedics reached him. He soon died.

His body, clothed only in dark pants and socks, was left on a breezeway for two hours, an airway tube sticking out of his mouth. Osman was 34.

The next day, an autopsy determined that he had died because his heart had suddenly stopped, confidential medical records show. Two physicians who reviewed his case for The Washington Post said he might have lived had he received timely treatment, perhaps as basic as an aspirin.

…Osman’s death is a single tragedy in a larger story of life, death and often shabby medical care within an unseen network of special prisons for foreign detainees across the country. Some 33,000 people are crammed into these overcrowded compounds on a given day, waiting to be deported or for a judge to let them stay here.

…The most vulnerable detainees, the physically sick and the mentally ill, are sometimes denied the proper treatment to which they are entitled by law and regulation. They are locked in a world of slow care, poor care and no care, with panic and coverups among employees watching it happen, according to a Post investigation.

The investigation found a hidden world of flawed medical judgments, faulty administrative practices, neglectful guards, ill-trained technicians, sloppy record-keeping, lost medical files and dangerous staff shortages. It is also a world increasingly run by high-priced private contractors. There is evidence that infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and chicken pox, are spreading inside the centers.

…Some 83 detainees have died in, or soon after, custody during the past five years. The deaths are the loudest alarms about a system teetering on collapse. Actions taken — or not taken — by medical staff members may have contributed to 30 of those deaths, according to confidential internal reviews and the opinions of medical experts who reviewed some death files for The Post.

…Nurses who work on the front lines see the problems up close. “Dogs get better care in the dog pound,” said Catherine Rouse, a contract nurse at an Arizona detention center who quit after two months last year because she saw what she regarded as “scary medicine” in the prison: patients taken off medications they needed and nurses doing tasks they were not qualified to do. “You don’t treat people like that. There has to be some kind of moral fiber,” Rouse said.

So what happens when the government takes over YOUR CARE and “Dogs get better care in the dog pound?” What happens when all of us, except the richest people who can go elsewhere, are stuck in a “system teetering on collapse.”

Liberals can promise anything that they want, but what you just read is the reality of what happens when you put an organization as incompetent as the federal government in charge of health care.

Endnotes:
  1. WAPO has done a piece: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/immigration/cwc_d1p1.html

Source URL: https://rightwingnews.com/uncategorized/a-preview-of-socialized-medicine/