Thursday, October 16, 2003 :::
Health Care
This is an especially interesting topic to me, as I work in a Medical Library. I recently had a conversation with a nurse friend about health care. We decided to agree to disagree because our basic views of healthcare were completely opposite. She felt everyone had a RIGHT to health care and I disagreed.
Yesterday, a patron came into the library looking for information on available health care for his students, who are mostly immigrants and migrant workers (probably illegal). I provided him with some information on places he might look in Delaware. And I even kept my opinion to myself. But the whole thing really annoyed me.
And today, I read a post from John Hawkins about illegal aliens in Washington state who can't get the government to pay for a kidney transplant and anti-rejection drugs. The story he refers to is from the Seattle-Post Intelligencer. And John rightly is angry about the emotional tone of the article. They try to appeal to your purse strings by showing how it would be much cheaper to pay for the transplant than the $35,000 annually they are forced to spend on his dialysis. Dialysis is covered as it's considered essential to an emergency condition. But John thinks the state should not even be paying for long-term care of an illegal alien. This is obviously a hot topic, as noted by the number of comments on his post. And why is that? The nurse friend I mentioned says it's because of lobbying by the nurses union, which she is very invovled in. Hmmm...
::: posted by Melissa at 10/16/2003 10:21:00 AM
