Opinions/Editorials
See other Opinions/Editorials Articles
Title: Rush Limbaugh, Inadvertent Socialized Medicine Fan
Source:
alternet
URL Source: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy ... rtent-socialized-medicine-fan/
Published: Mar 10, 2010
Author: Daniela Perdomo
Post Date: 2010-03-10 10:48:54 by go65
Keywords: None
Views: 757
Comments: 14
The low-end of the right-wing, hate-talk AM dial has a socialized medicine supporter! OK, an inadvertent public option supporter. It all started in January, when Rush Limbaugh was rushed to a hospital in Hawaii with chest pains. At a press conference after his recovery, he crowed: “Based on what happened here to me, I don’t think there’s one thing wrong with the American health care system. It is working just fine, just dandy.” What Limbaugh appears to not have known is that since 1974, Hawaii has had a state-wide employer mandate for health insurance. The employer mandate is one of the key points of health care reform that right-wingers like Limbaugh have railed against throughout the debate in Washington over the past year. And then this week, a caller to his syndicated radio show asked Limbaugh what he would do if health care reform passed. Limbaugh’s response? I don’t know. I’ll just tell you this, if this passes and it’s five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented — I am leaving the country. I’ll go to Costa Rica. Not only is this a fantastic prospect — Limbaugh might leave his beloved U.S.A.! — but he has once again inadvertently (or not) given signs he supports socialized health care. Indeed, perhaps what he’s saying is that the kind of health care reform currently on the table in Washington is not socialized enough for him. Why else would he pick out Costa Rica? It has universal, low-cost public health care (which the country can finance thanks to, among other things, having abolished their military) — they even offer it to undocumented immigrants. Thanks to this incredible system, Costa Ricans have a very high life expectancy, of 78.8 years. That’s higher than any autonomous nation in the Americas. Now that’s what I call a developing nation.
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: go65 (#0)
(Edited)
Their lack of enforcement of Man/Boy sex laws as pointed out by right wing preachers?
Day 17 of Packrat refusing to register here. Day 15 Of Boofer The One Eyed Wonder Bot refusing to answer: When is Blackwell going to have the recount? Jan 30, 2006 ... by saveliberty (Proud to be Head Snowflake, Bushbot...
False.
my anti groupie can't get through life without me.
In five years pigboy will be 65 and on Medicare, just like his parents were. Since Medicare is "socialized medicine", I guess he'll be leaving no matter what.
Limbaugh would use the private health care available there. Th reality of public health care in Costa Rica: The Patient Reality Dealing with the Costa Rican public healthcare system is a lesson in humility for patients and visitors alike. While one might compare this to U.S. healthcare for the non-insured, keep in mind that 86% of Costa Ricans subscribe to this system and employers are required to subsidize it for their employees. This is my personal experience with public healthcare in Costa Rica, as a visitor: On a trip to the beach, my boyfriend Luis broke his arm playing football. We were told there is only one ambulance in the Jaco region and that it would be quicker to drive him to a private clinic to get X-rays. A quick check up, two X-rays and $140 later it was confirmed that he had a distal fracture in his right humerus at a sharp 70 degree angle. They put his arm in a sling and sent us an hour north to the closest public hospital in Puntarenas. In Puntarenas he was seen immediately by a general practitioner to analyze the situation and put on the appropriate waiting list. An hour later waiting with another orthopedic patient, a doctor told Luis it was the orthopedic specialist’s day off. After further stabilizing the arm, he said we’d have to go to San Jose to Hospital Mexico and they would likely have to operate. Despite fainting two times in the office, Luis was told that the ambulance would probably take 45 minutes to get there and he’d be better off if we could drive him. After a 2 ½ hour drive, I dropped Luis off at the emergency room in Hospital Mexico. However, because of his local address in San Jose, he would have to go to a different hospital 15 minutes away: Hospital San Juan de Dios. The ambulance was in Alajuela, so we had to drive him to the 3rd emergency room of the day. By the time a doctor was able to see Luis, after providing all of his personal details for the 3rd time that day despite their centralized information database, it was 11:30 p.m. – 10 ½ hours after the accident. Culture Clash A smiling doctor called me into the emergency room where bleeding bodies filled the hallways on gurneys parked along the wall. He said Luis would have to stay overnight because he needed surgery once they found the necessary materials, which might not happen for four days. At that point, Luis was sitting up on a padded table instead of a bed, with no pillow and couldn’t lie down because it would pull on his bandaged arm. Despite my protests, the doctor said if we take him out of the hospital, he would lose his spot on the surgery list. As it was way past visitor hours, I wasn’t allowed to return with his things and a pillow and would have to come back the next day between 6 and 7 p.m. for emergency room visiting hours. For the next 20 days, my life, while rotating around hospital schedules, was spent trapped in visitor waiting lines and arguing with nurses and guards about lost visitor cards and smuggled snacks. The visiting hours had been reduced to one due to an outbreak of Clostridium difficile that claimed seven lives on the 5th floor (which we could oddly never find). Each patient could only have one visitor at a time, which proved difficult when Luis’s mom came to visit from Guanacaste for more than a week. The doctors only passed by once a day at 6 a.m. to see patients but avoided questions as skillfully as the nurses, telling Luis that they were waiting on more tests or that there weren’t materials for surgery. Consulting orthopedic doctors in the states, I was forewarned of possible complications like muscle atrophy or the bone resetting incorrectly due to the extended lack of medical attention. The question of taking him out of San Juan and sending him to a private hospital for several thousand dollars tore at us. Promises that his surgery would happen soon made us keep him there, but as estimated dates came and went, our frustration was at an all time high. By day 10, I had dug up contact information for the director and ex-director of the hospital and the president of the Caja and sent a very worried e-mail claiming negligence on the part of the hospital and referred to the poor treatment that my boyfriend was receiving. That same day an orthopedic surgeon arrived during visiting hours with my printed e-mail in hand demanding to know who wrote it. Ten days after Luis’s internment, this doctor finally told us that they are still waiting results from an CAT scan, nuclear medicine tests and bone density scan to rule out the possibility that the fracture was caused by bone cancer. The word “Cancer” is powerful enough to shut anyone up – for a moment at least. The fact that they were being thorough in their care does not explain why test results that take one day to obtain in the U.S. were delayed more than a week and a half. It does not make up for 10 days of inconsistent excuses about a lack of materials or lost exam results delaying his surgery – which had us unrightfully turn our frustration to the Caja system. It does not make up for indifferent nurses who would ignore yells for help from the patients sharing Luis’s ward. On one of his first mornings in the orthopedic ward, a nurse shooed Luis’s mom away as she helped him take off his hospital shirt, insisting he is too old to need help maneuvering his unset broken arm. These were the same nurses that refused to show him his medical files despite a Patient Code of Right’s directly stating his right to see them, and who made mistakes like hooking up a patient in critical condition to an empty tank of oxygen overnight. The Silver Lining On day 18, Luis was finally sent to the surgery ward. He was operated on by the chief of orthopedics due to the abnormal situation in which the fracture occurred. The operation went flawlessly and a 6 inch metal plate was placed with 4 pins in his arm. He regained full mobility in his hand and six months later, has overcome most of the atrophy that occurred during his 20 days of hospitalization.
Why'd you leave this part out puddin'? In closing, I believe that healthcare should be a right bestowed on all citizens despite their income or current health. Offering preventative medicine to the lower class will offset expensive medical procedures in the future. The existence of a low cost public option has had far reaching positive influences, and its presence serves as a check on private health care prices, while at the same time the better quality and speed of care are plenty to justify a price difference. With the high level of medical education and modern health facilities in the states, we have the hope and possibility of staffing public hospitals with more qualified health care workers. There may still be a discrepancy in how quickly such a system can attend to its populace versus private health care, but as long as the quality is there, those who would otherwise face 6-digit health care bills might find that they too have a little patience in them. Our current situation puts the nation’s health in the hands of a profit motivated health insurance industry. In our system, preventative health care is seen as a cut to the bottom line. Taking profit out of the insurance system is the only way to put priorities back into place and make care more affordable for those without insurance. For the rest of us who have the luxury of acting on the belief that health is invaluable, may we rest assured that we have more than one option.
Day 17 of Packrat refusing to register here. Day 15 Of Boofer The One Eyed Wonder Bot refusing to answer: When is Blackwell going to have the recount? Jan 30, 2006 ... by saveliberty (Proud to be Head Snowflake, Bushbot...
Why pick the private care there versus the private care here? Costa Rica is far more socialized in its health care system than anything proposed for the U.S.
Being a Republican means you get to choose your own reality.
I posted the reality, not the hopery. You get what you pay for.
Under Obamacare, there may eventually be no "private care" here.
I'm sure folks make the same dumb statement when Costa Rica went to a single-payer system as well.
Being a Republican means you get to choose your own reality.
The reality is that Costa Rica socialized its health insurance industry, and despite all the whining and moaning from folks like yourself that socialized medicine is evil, your oracle on the hill has expressed a preference for receiving care in a country which has a Canadian-style single-payer healthcare system, exposing you guys as absolutely full of s*8t.
Being a Republican means you get to choose your own reality.
Do a little honest research on your utopia of public health insurance. It's a fucking nightmare and we don't want it here: Matt Hogan, 35, co-founder of Finca Bella Vista, a sustainable treehouse community near the Osa Peninsula. In late 2009 he had a motorcycle accident, and was taken to the newly opened public hospital in Ciudad Cortéz. “All the newspapers had been boasting about the brand-new, state-of-the-art facilities and medical equipment, 300 clean new beds, and the rest,” says Matt. What the newspaper accounts failed to mention, according to Matt, was that all those new beds were serviced by only a few doctors who showed up only once in a while. Matt says he suffered serious neglect and misdiagnosis (they told him he was fine). Feeling anything but fine, he had himself driven by ambulance to San José and checked himself into private Clínica Bíblica. There he was found to have one collapsed lung and the other in mid-collapse, as well as severe internal bleeding in his chest cavity. The doctors at Bíblica said that if Matt had waited another day to seek proper care he most likely would have suffocated. Matt was very happy with the care he received at Bíblica, adding with a smile that “all the nurses were very attractive young Ticas.” __ Alaska native Alex Murray, 72 at the time of a fire that burned over 20 percent of his body, endured an extended hospital stay that also allowed him to compare private and public care in Costa Rica. “While expat friends with residency have had important procedures successfully performed at slight cost in the public system,” he says. “I recommend avoiding it in life-threatening situations if at all possible.” Alex was burning garden trash at his home in the Lake Arenal region when he spilled some gas, causing the fire to flare up and burn him over much of his body. Alex spent the next 20 days in two hospitals in the capital city of San Jose, first at the public Hospital San Juan de Dios, and then at private “Of course,” he admits, “it’s a foregone conclusion that such a comparison is unfair to the underfunded public hospital, but the devil’s in the personal details.” Alex was first picked up by a Red Cross ambulance and taken to a clinic in nearby Tilarán. Then he was moved to the public hospital in Liberia (about an hour north), where the doctors decided to send him to the burn unit at San Juan de Dios (a public hospital) in the capital city of San José, 4 hours away. “Arriving in San Jose,” says Alex, “we should have directed the driver immediately to Bíblica or Clinica Católica [two private hospitals], but, ignorant of the quality of the public hospital and anxious to get treatment, we let the driver take us to the teeming mystery that is San Juan.” Three days at a Public Hospital: San Juan de Dios “In our three days there,” says Alex, “no doctor ever consulted us, though one led a group of students into my room each day. The nurses, male and female, sometimes seemed like the proverbial five or six workmen who stand around a pothole gabbing while one guy fills the hole. For the most part, they were not dedicated, not attentive, not very competent, and not sympathetic. They seemed the dregs of the nursing schools. A friendly nurse assigned to draw blood samples spent three days drilling mostly dry holes all over my landscape, partly due to my extremely low blood pressure. One rough middle-aged nurse told me that I was not much hurt nor in pain. I finally had to yell at her, “Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me.” She desisted, smiling to herself, it seemed. “A night crew came on and half-heartedly started to bathe me and change my dressings. Three stood on one side of the bed and made little come-hither motions with their fingers. Two stood on the other side and made little shooing gestures. Finally, they decided to help me turn. “They would not let my wife sleep in one of the three extra beds crowded into my room. Instead she spent her nights trying to sleep in a plastic chair. In the not-very-clean bathroom, she found bloody bandages in a corner.” Seventeen Days at a Private Hospital: Clínica Bíblica Alex and his wife decided that they needed to move him to a private facility. “When I was admitted to Clínica Bíblica,” he says, “I recognized immediately that here was a competent staff. The emergency room nurse quickly found a vein and soon had a set of color-coded vials filled with my blood. All staff were purposeful and attentive. “The next evening I began to rave and tried to tear off my bandages and leave the hospital. A doctor soon arrived and said my actions were due to a lack of oxygen to the brain. I was then moved to intensive care where a coma was induced and I was intubated, remaining thus for five days, not a reassuring sight for my four daughters who arrived from points around the globe. “I doubt that these measures would have been taken at San Juan de Dios. Three doctors tended me at Bíblica, one a burn doctor, one a plastic surgeon who moved skin from my thigh to my hip, and one a staff doctor. They each came by almost every day to talk with us. The nursing staff was a no-nonsense but friendly and attentive group, evidently the better graduates of the nursing schools. Midway through my stay, physical therapists began visiting daily to exercise my wasted muscles. When I left, I had lost 14 pounds and could walk only a few steps unassisted, but I was recovering. “And throughout my stay, my wife was permitted to sleep on a narrow built-in bed or cot in each room. “
And yet Limbaugh says he's going there. What does that say about Limbaugh's judgment?
Being a Republican means you get to choose your own reality.
What does that say about Limbaugh's judgment? I would have to here Limbaugh explain his rationale. He certainly wouldn't be using the public health care there.
How would you survive the tedium.
So why do you bother soiling this site with your vacuous and inane commentary? ... yukon haha lots of laughing out loud
Why else would he pick out Costa Rica?
#2. To: go65 (#0)
#3. To: go65 (#0)
I don’t know. I’ll just tell you this, if this passes and it’s five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented — I am leaving the country. I’ll go to Costa Rica.
#4. To: go65 (#0)
#5. To: dont eat that (#4)
(Edited)
#6. To: dont eat that (#4)
Limbaugh would use the private health care available there.
#7. To: war (#5)
#8. To: go65 (#6)
Why pick the private care there versus the private care here?
#9. To: dont eat that (#8)
Under Obamacare, there may eventually be no "private care" here.
#10. To: dont eat that (#7)
I posted the reality, not the hopery. You get what you pay for.
#11. To: go65 (#10)
#12. To: dont eat that (#11)
Do a little honest research on your utopia of public health insurance. It's a fucking nightmare and we don't want it here:
#13. To: go65 (#12)
And yet Limbaugh says he's going there.
#14. To: dont eat that (#13)
I would have to here Limbaugh explain his rationale.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]