DiRN's Journal

Whoa, Di's gone political? Di has been political all along, I just haven't been showing it in this forum. Come on, I'm a Stowers, right...We always have opinions...Even Kylie had opinions when she was critically ill and sedated :).

I feel that my thirty years of experience in the health care field, 10 of those years in home care where I worked directly with the government medical programs Medicare and Medicaid gives me some expertise on this subject.

Do I have an agenda? Heck yes!!! On personal level, most of the people with chd kids are scared to death. If the government closes down reimbursement on the surgeries that these kids need, our kids die...It's as simple as that.

OK Di, the government would never ration health care to babies, would they? They already are. In my state of Ohio, it is impossible for a Down's syndrome child to get a heart transplant if they are on Medicaid... They can't even go onto the list for transplant. This is the one example that I have had the most experience with since many Downs kids also have heart defects. It's part of the "syndrome" part of Downs.

Ohio is better than Oregon however. In the state of Oregon if you are on their Medicaid program and are diagnosed prenatally with complex deformities, treatment for your child will not be paid for... at all. You are advised to abort or you must chose to move or your baby will be allowed to die after birth.

Di it must be illegal for them to deny life preserving care to a baby, right? True, it is, NOW. These kids are now protected by the "Baby Doe Laws", passed under the Reagan administration in the mid eighties. Before Baby Doe, yes it was legal to put a newborn with birth defects"on the window sill", basically not put the baby under the warmer lights, don't feed, and let it die. This child has birth defects, remember and to save them you have to intervene right after birth. As long as the parents agreed, the doctors would write the orders. What was worse were cases like the one I was involved with back in the early eighties. This baby was two months old when the parents and doctor decided to "put it on the windowsill". We were ordered not to feed it, just basic hygienic care and let it die. There was a group of nurses that could not follow that order. I was not allowed to join the group that actually disobeyed the order, but I was one of the "guard dogs" that watched for doctors, supervisors etc. while the baby was fed. We also got the Medical Ethics Committee involved, got a court injunction to disallow that particular order until we had it tried in court, generally bunged everything up. It was kind of wild and wooley there for a while and when it was discovered that some nurses disobeyed orders, there was quite a stink. They kept their nursing licenses, but...any advancement in their careers was toast. Baby Doe was the result of nurses all over the country whose committment to life and healing was greater than their committment to their paychecks and careers.

If this bill is so wonderful, why won't our congressmen and women ditch their "everything covered" private health care insurance?

The Canadian governmental health care program is held up as a "model" for the Proposed American program. Why do people with the means cross the border to be treated in America?

Because they don't want to wait or risk their health and sometimes life waiting for it to be their "turn" to get their heart surgery or joint replacements or whatever. I live just south of the Canadian border, I SEE this happening with my own eyes.

Also, why have Countries such as India or some of the Eastern European countried developed special "Hospitals" to serve people from First World countries with National Health Caree

And I don't even have time to tell you some of the horror stories that I have found myself involved in when you get a pissy government bureaucrat upset. Let's put it this way... Take a deep breath, hold your nose, and pucker up real pretty...because to give your patient the care that they NEED, you are going to be kissing some major butt!

More to follow, but do you see what I'm saying? This is a horrible idea on so many levels.