Take Two Aspirin and Call Me Crazy
Mitt Romney has an answer for the lame, the lost, and the last. The damn emergency room, you fool. After all, isn’t that what Jesus said to do?
Downplaying the need for the government to ensure that every person has health insurance, Mitt Romney on Sunday suggested that emergency room care suffices as a substitute for the uninsured.
“Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance,” he said in an interview with Scott Pelley of CBS’s “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday night. “If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.”
We have a county commissioner here in Fort Bend who calls himself a financial expert. However, he is most often described as the only guy I know who will spend five dollars to save a dime. So, now at least he’s not the only guy. You can add Mitt Romney to that tinkered thinkin’.
Mitt, Darlin’, think this thing all the way through to the end, because saving a dime by not giving this guy blood pressure medicine makes us pay for a heart attack. I don’t know this for a fact, but I’ve heard that heart attacks are way more expensive than Diovan.
I had occasion about a month ago to go to the emergency room of a local hospital on a Sunday night with some very frightening symptoms that, luckily, turned out to be a treatable condition. I waited in a packed emergency room for 6 hours before seeing a doctor. It was four hours before I even had my blood pressure and temperature taken. Our emergency rooms in Texas are overwhelmed with the uninsured.
Mitt Romney does not have a clue how real life works. When Mitt Romney needs health care, he just buys a hospital and then strips it down and sells it piece by piece when he gets well.
I think it’s real sweet that Mitt Romney wants Americans to get the most expensive heath care available – emergency rooms. But, I think what they really want is the far cheaper thing called “health care.”
Great piece. It is just amazing that he could sit there and say those things with a straight face, but then that seems to be all he has. What a joke, but then thee are a lot of people out there who fall for the joke.
1He seems to think that ECUs are free. Which, yet again, shows just how out of touch with reality he is. You go to an ECU and don’t have insurance or a job you are still going to get a bill from the hospital, doctor, ambulance (if you used one) and they will continue to harass you for money you don’t have. Remember recently the guy that saved a kid from drowning and was billed $2600 – mostly for a 15 mile ambulance drive? Who in their right mind wants this jerk elected president?
2And the bill will cause another heart attack – full circle.
3Anyone check the fee for ambulances lately?
But then, unlike preventive care in a healthcare plan, the citizen foots the whole bill. That version of “personal responsibility” suits Romoney just fine.
He’s going down in a ball of flame. On InTrade it is 70/30 for Obama and the chance of him getting 320 electoral votes is 59%.
I can’t wait for the debates!
4JJ, listen, I love you, I really do. but willard is a mormon. they only put jesus in their name to make it look like they were OK but they aren’t christians. so why would willard do what jesus tells him t do?
5If everybody gets free medical care at the emergency room,THAT’S SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. If you have to BUY medical insurance, that’s called CAPITALISM. Or Obamacare.
6Hey, Folks, didn’t one of our distinguished former presidents say the same thing? Thank goodness he was extinguished by term limits.
Love your point, JJ. My Beloved is a retired Registered Nurse and she, too, agrees that ER is the most expensive health care treatment the U.S. has to offer.
I had a piece of junk removed from my eye not long ago. Cost over $450. But to make me happy, the ER doc wrote me a prescription for 60 (count ’em—sixty) Oxycontins. Guess he thought I was Rush Limbaugh. I did not fill the script.
7The only way I could dislike Mitt Romney more if if I got to know him personally.
8@Wyatt_Earl- yep. While in Yucatan I went to the emergency room for a good split on my chin after a fall. I walked in, was offered the first chair by others waiting due to the blood coming down my arm holding my chin shut. I had no insurance. I was in and out in 45 minutes- after stitches,with the proceedure room fee and the doctors fee 450$ pesos (at the time 12 to 1 about $37 usd). Free follow-up to remove stitches. On the other side- my Yucatecan friends were in the States visiting Disneyworld. Their daughter felt ill so they took her to emergency. To even take a seat $200usd was required upfront. They left. They went to a pharmacy (where doctors do not dispense care as they do in Yucatan) and went from there. She was fine. It was Excitement. Her father’s excitement level was on par of that of a heart attack scale for the pricing for a seat in a US emergency room just to enter.
9Actually this fits in perfectly well with Mitt’s philosophy. After all, if poor people die because of inadequate health care then they don’t need health care. Problem solved.
10A year ago, emergency room, suspected heart problem (false alarm) two nights in hospital $17,000. Oh yeah that is so affordable!
11I’d question what Mitt was smoking or drinking but since he is a Mormon, I can only surmise this wealthy man doesn’t have a clue. He should go out and buy some.
12And here in Dallas ( city of a million + people ), I have had a very difficult time finding a doctor who will accept Medicare assignment. And dental/oral surgical care is out the roof and no dental insurance will cover even the smallest part of it. Many of us who are in our 60’s and up are in need of serious dental care and cannot afford it at all. One more way to kill off a certain segment of the population, I suppose. Why on this earth can we not get a single payer system of health care that will cover medical, dental, and vision care as they do in other industrialized countries? We’re not poor and most of our friends are not either, but given the prices of oral surgery and dental care, we soon will be. Article in the Dallas Morning News today about lack of reasonably priced health care for all contributing to homelessness.
13Dallas does not offer much in the way of low cost or sliding scale dental care. I recall that one medical professional stopped donating her time to a clinic here because the people she served “were not grateful enough”. That seems to be the prevailing mentality among the Rmoney-ites. The 47% are just not grateful enough for all of this largesse !
The ignorant SOB is partly right. ER’s are not allowed to turn people away because they can’t pay. Two weeks ago, I cut my finger badly enough that after 3 hours it was still gushing happily so I took myself off to the ER because it’s the only place that does that kind of work on evenings and weekends. While I was there, I noticed a man complaining bitterly because “they” had taken his daughter out of the waiting room and swabbed her throat and brought her back to the waiting room. He took his daughter to the ER because she has a sore throat! There has to be a better way to handle these minor issues than that. If he has insurance he’ll end up paying a copay that’s about 10 times what it would be if he had taken her to a family doctor or critical care facility during normal working hours. If he didn’t have insurance he’ll find himself with a bill for at least $1,000 where if he had insurance his carrier would have been billed for about half that. In my case, a Physician’s Assistant cleaned the wound, sutured it, bandaged it, and told me to make an appt. with my doctor to remove the sutures in 10 days or so. I got billed for the $100 copay because I wasn’t admitted.
In contrast, on July 20, 1969 (I remember the date because of the moon landing) I was helping a neighbor clear brush on the new lot he was building his next house upon and I managed to hit myself in the shin with a cutting tool. I applied Boy Scout first aid and closed the cut with improvised butterflies made from adhesive tape and went back to work. When I got home at 8:00 that night, my mother freaked, and the word TETANUS appeared in a thought bubble over her head and she called our family doctor, got his answering service, got a call back from the doctor who was handling calls that weekend, we drove to his office and waited ’til he got there and opened up and cleaned up the wound, sutured it, gave me a tetanus booster, and sent us on our way with instructions to keep it clean, keep it dry, and make an appt. with the regular doctor to remove the sutures in a week or so. I don’t know what the bill was but I expect it wasn’t much different from a normal, scheduled office visit with maybe an added annoyance fee. I don’t know if was covered by insurance — I think at that time we only had hospitalization insurance that covered the big things.
So now, with modern medicine I get the same treatment at a multi-million dollar Emergency Dept as I got in a simple doctor’s office and it probably cost about 10 times more (inflation adjusted). The funny thing is, when I made the appt. with my doctor, they told me I should have called there first because he’s often in the office on weekends and would have enjoyed a break from paperwork.
14Romney sang an entirely different song in order to get Romneycare passed in Massachusetts. He’s going to need major surgery for a broken coccyx if he doesn’t quit flipping and flopping. His brain is beyond repair.
15And don’t forget, emergency clinics aren’t required to fix anything. They legally have to stabilize you – that is, they aren’t allowed to kick you to the curb if you might actually die on the sidewalk. More than that is not legally required and won’t be given unless you have insurance or can pay.
So we have people who aren’t getting fixed and will have one crisis after another, until they actually die. And at these prices!? (For which they will be billed, regardless of what Willard thinks.)
16For the past 37 years I have been in and out of more hospitals than I can name (cancer among other things). But only twice have I had to go to the emergency room – once for a missing finger tip – (goofy “accident” I won’t talk about). It was on the weekend and the stupid “doctor” messed up my finger big time (my regular doctor the following Monday was not pleased at all). In the end they could not so sew the end of my finger back on so I gave the doctor the finger!
The second ER visit was a bit more exciting. I was having some problems so I called the clinic to make an appointment. I called in the morning, told them my problems and made an appointment for that afternoon. About 30 minutes later they called and said “Get your *&% over here now! You won’t live til 2.” So off I went. There was a new doctor at the clinic – cute little blond gal! She had never seen me before and had not had a chance to look over my files. When I walked into the clinic, immediately nurses appeared, pumped me full of beta blockers etc., plopped me in a wheelchair, the new lady doctor gave me a quick going over and off to the hospital emergency room I went. From there things got strange and rather funny. In ER, they hooked me up to ekgs and more, stuck a nitro tablet under my tongue and I used the ER phone to call a friend. “Where are you?” she asked. “In the hospital. They say I am dying. You have the keys – you know what to do.”
A bit later the cute lady doctor came in – charts in each hand and a strange look on her face. She waved one chart saying “I don’t know what to think. This one says you are dying. This one says there is nothing wrong.” She was really perplexed. The whole problem was I was suffering from previous operations several years earlier. The outcome was when I got home a few hours later, my friend was leaving my house with all the documents, records and files… as per instructions.
Medicare picked up most of the tab for all that and I never even saw a bill from the finger episode. I think that one got lost somewhere.
As for the cute lady doctor, she became my regular doctor for the next 12 or so years – thru west nile, contrast reactions, bleeding ulcers, angioplasties, and so much more. She has now moved on and I miss her.
I go in for AVR at 3am tomorrow morning. Wish me luck!
17Considering how much Mitt’s health response would cost, maybe he will give away is money and……
18Ya know Mitt, I’m feeling a little nauseous here. Would you do me a favor and take off your seat belt and kick out that plastic window to let in some air?
19I know of two people this year (writers not making Stephen King kinds of money) who died of heart attacks in their apartments because they were poor and had no medical insurance and knew they couldn’t afford a visit to the ER. Both had symptoms over 24 hours before they died.
Mitt’s a damn liar and stupid besides.
20MB, good luck on your AVR whatever that is. Keep us posted. Having spent a goodly hunk of the past summer in and out of hospitals, I can say, HURRAY FOR MEDICARE! Everyone needs it.
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