Posted by: Steve Hemmingsen - 10/31/2009 12:00 AM
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You can hardly look into any corner of our arcane health care system without finding something that needs fixin.’ Money spent on kids’ castles…albeit donated…that could be better spent on cures, overpriced insurance and drugs and on and on.
Here’s one more twig for this fire of reform that glows hopefully and then dims depending on the day and who is handing out the biggest campaign contributions; bribes. This one isn’t even high on my personal list of things that needs doing, just one more twig.
On the way home from my recent
As I understand it, if you’re in health homecare you are, more or less, under medical house arrest. If you’re seen outside your home, you could lose your home health care.
The intent is clear. There are people who would take advantage and flat out commit fraud, people who would use home health care as a cleaning service and party on.
This is hardly the case with my friend. She is very sick, very, but that is not to say that she is immobile on good days. She has been very active in her community, the same community in which she has lived and raised her children since I was a third grader…or was it fourth…the same house?
Knowing her as I do, I would think a short field trip on a good day, a cup of coffee uptown instead of in bed, maybe a lunch with friends, would be therapeutic. But, under the rules, as I understand them, such an event could leave her high and dry on the bad days; a real life Catch 22. The solution seems simple since we’re so big on decisions being made by doctors and patients. Couldn’t a doctor point out that the patient would have difficulty tending to her or himself fulltime, but could stand a little uplift, a bit of R and R, a furlough from time to time?
Isn’t this an exact example of what the right wing nuts are worried about if the government gets deeper into our health care, the loss of individual freedom and judgment? Yes, it is. But I’m still willing to risk it and fix it as opposed to leaving the medical privateers in charge. A privateer was a pirate who operated with a government license. In the end, a lot of them still wound up on a gallows.
Anyway, my friend an I still had a good visit, talking about the politics of medicine and education and the lunacy of life in general. As gripes go, I doubt if this one is very high on either of our lists at the moment, just another good program that needs some tweaking.
12:00 AM
