How poverty kills

From the New York Times: "A nationwide study has found that the uninsured and those covered by Medicaid are more likely than those with private insurance to receive a diagnosis of cancer in late stages, often diminishing their chances of survival. ... The widest disparities were noted in cancers that could be detected early through standard screening or assessment of symptoms, like breast cancer, lung cancer, colon cancer and melanoma. For each, uninsured patients were two to three times more likely to be diagnosed in Stage III or Stage IV rather than Stage I."
The study was done by scientists with the American Cancer Society, which I find a pretty reputable source.
But it's also, as my grandkids would say, a "Duh-HUH," or as my kids used to say, "no duh!"
Michael had symptoms for months. He was getting colonoscopies every year or so because he knew he was very high-risk. He was in school, so he wasn't insured and he didn't have much money. The doctors saw a mass and told him it was scar tissue. Only when it blocked his colon and he was near death did they investigate. They couldn't get the scope past the mass, but they didn't say anything to him for another three weeks. They didn't put him in the hospital until he was in renal failure. By then his colon cancer was Stage III, giving him about a 50-50 chance for five-year survival. He has had radiation and two rounds of chemo at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars. He was left to die by doctors in Savannah and rescued by doctors at Duke University Medical Center. He was lucky because he had people who know how to advocate for him.
Our so-called health care system is a mess. Even people with insurance can't afford good care anymore, and people are dying from things that shouldn't kill them.
If the doctors had removed the mass in my son's colon when they first saw it, he would have escaped unspeakable suffering, and it would have been a whole lot less expensive to treat him. Instead, a hospital charity paid for his first round of care and Duke University Medical Center picked up the next round until he was finally approved for Medicaid a year after his initial diagnosis.
To keep his Medicaid, he can make no more than $10 an hour -- when he can work. Three years after his diagnosis, it finally looks like he will start getting disability checks.
He has lived in pain and in poverty because we as a nation don't care enough to offer quality health care for everyone.
And he's not alone. Sometimes when I talk about the travesty of letting people go without care because they're poor, someone will say it doesn't happen very often, or maybe if Michael had made better choices when he was a teenager, he would have had a job with health benefits. That's a load of crap.
When a child in Washington dies because his mother can't find a dentist to treat his tooth abcess until it has infected his brain, when a woman chooses not to have chemotherapy for her colon cancer because she's not insured and she doesn't want to incur $200,000 in debt, that's not about making good choices as a teenager. It's about corporate greed and government apathy -- or corruption.
My son has another doctor's appointment tomorrow to see if they can identify the reason for the excruciating abdominal pain he has had for the last four months. They believe it's the result of the multiple surgeries he has had, and they hope they can fix it without major surgery, but they have to find the cause first.
It didn't have to come to this. He should never have had to suffer this way -- no one should. He was allowed to get this sick because he didn't have insurance.
Access to quality health care -- or at least competent health care -- should be a right for everyone.