Community | August 11, 2009 | 15 comments

"If you think the government can solve all of our problems ask an Indian."

source: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/353/18/1881

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curtisreed
I've heard so much about how "great" a single payer system will be for America, but I have to ask: if the Federal Government can't get it right for our Native Americans, why should we trust them with our care?

From the New England Journal of Medicine

"The outdated, understaffed hospital in this community had only four beds, a busy outpatient clinic with five working exam rooms, and a small emergency room with four stations. A few run-down trailers held additional clinics and services. A sign on the door of the emergency room cautioned patients not to bring firearms into the facility — a constant reminder of perennial violence and trauma. After the vast, shiny university teaching hospital in which I had most recently worked, this facility came as quite a shock.

Part of my job was to help cover the emergency room. Although the hospital was built to be staffed by 12 physicians, only 3 others worked there when I arrived. During every emergency room shift, I cared for adults and children with broken bones from unintentional injuries and car accidents, attended to patients in various stages of alcohol or drug intoxication, and treated the unfortunate and often preventable complications of chronic disease.

...
Although the federal government has a trust responsibility to provide health care for American Indians and Alaska Natives, the Indian Health Service is substantially underfunded and understaffed. This service was established in 1955 to provide primary care and public health services on or near Indian reservations. Although it can take credit for great improvements in health status, significant disparities in health and the quality of care persist 50 years later (see Figure 1). Many factors contribute to these disparities, but the failure of the federal government to adequately fund the Indian Health Service for the provision of care to the 1.8 million patients it is supposed to serve means that the promises of treaties signed in the 1800s have never been fulfilled. Indian Health Service per capita health care expenditures are much lower than those of other health care systems in the United States."

Here's another article by the Commonwealth Fund
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/usr_doc/roubideaux_qualityhltcare_aians_756.pdf


Finally, read this article, from which I got my title:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-giago/how-will-universal-health_b_218636.html

"Those Americans opposed to it compare it to Canada's or Britain's health care systems, which they say are nothing but socialized medicine. The Indian Health Care system, deemed a "historic failure" by Sebelius, has also been labeled as socialized medicine, and the fact that she would label it as a failure does not place much faith in an even larger universal health care system. It just seems that every time the federal government takes total control over anything, failure is almost assured. Watch out General Motors."

"This brings us full circle to the old saying, 'If you think the government can solve all of our problems ask an Indian.'
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15 comments // "If you think the government can solve all of our problems ask an Indian."

  • MoonLoon
    • 0
      MoonLoon  

    • I will vote for Universal Healthcare, when every low politician and their cronies are forced to sign up for the same program.

    • 2 years ago
  • akamaial
    • 0
      akamaial [removed]  
    • MoonLoon:

      Agreed. a universal health care would be great, if it were the same for everybody, but it will be just another socialost program that will always have preferential treatment for the "elite", while those deemed less "worthy" of benefit to the "state" will only receive what is deemed "appropriate" care and/or fall through the administrative cracks with care that is too little, too late.

    • 2 years ago
  • curtisreed
  • div
    • 0
      div  

    • Yeah.. I sincerely doubt that they really tried to do anything to help native peoples. It's not really a great analogy because the natives had and pretty much HAVE now power to change what they've been given.

      Now if all American people work together to get something that works for them, that's a different case. All Americans together have more power than all Native people would have.

      I just don't understand why, instead of coming up with alternative plans that can work for everyone, people *cough*conservatives*cough* are just criticizing Obama. Isn't this the time to put your two cents in and work together to make a plan that WORKS?

    • 2 years ago
  • akamaial
    • 0
      akamaial [removed]  
    • div:

      I'm not a partisan on "sides" regarding the issue, but what I see though is a failure to in fact work together. . . It appears the Demos think they have the "lock" on the way they it should be written. . . .i.e., "my way or the highway"...whereas the Repubs & "Blue Dog Demos think this is a bad bill being "rammed" down the throat of the populace come hell or high water.

    • 2 years ago
  • curtisreed
    • 0
      curtisreed  
    • div:

      div, this isn't an "analogy"! There already is a model of government run healthcare in the system, on the Indian Reservations, and it's been called a failure.
      "Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius acknowledged on Tuesday that government health care for American Indians has been a “historic failure” for more than a century and pledged to launch an extended effort to improve it."

      Not to mention the failures at Walter Reed Hospital, the bankruptcy of Medicaid, Medicare, and other examples of gross failures by the federal government to run its current medical systems.

    • 2 years ago
  • jayrye
    • 0
      jayrye  

    • Maybe if we stopped our military industrial complex more funding could be funneled into universal medicine. I'm sorry, but 50 million people go without medical coverage and I was one of them until a year ago.

      The Declaration of Independence said that 'life' is an inalienable right. Today, health care is part of the avg. American's 'life'. I feel that more needs to be done to ensure every American has equal access to things we view as rights. Money and possessions were never considered inalienable to our founding fathers, otherwise slavery would still be legal.

    • 2 years ago
  • curtisreed
    • 0
      curtisreed  
    • jayrye:

      "Maybe if we stopped our military industrial complex more funding could be funneled into universal medicine." You can't afford universal healthcare if you can't protect your national interests. If we didn't have a good military, I guess we would have just had to take it on the chin on 9/11 because we couldn't have reached the Taliban/al Qaeda. That sort of thinking leaves us weak.

      "I'm sorry, but 50 million people go without medical coverage and I was one of them until a year ago. " So? the nubmers they give are 45 million, not 50. That's about 15% of the population. So to you it makes sense to scrap the working system of 85% to cover 15%? Why not come up with a simpler insurance plan to cover that 15% for catastrophic care and leave everyone else alone?

      "The Declaration of Independence said that 'life' is an inalienable right." That's "unalienable", but I made the same mistake once. Did you notice that the founders NEVER mentioned ONE "right" that the government had to pay for? Freedom of speech is not a subsidized program. You have a right to own a gun, but does the government have to buy you one?No one ever intended for access to medical care to be an "entitlement". That's what we're talking about here: should we rob Peter to pay for Paul's doctor? Or should Paul work to pay the doctor like everyone else?

      "I feel that more needs to be done to ensure every American has equal access to things we view as rights. Money and possessions were never considered inalienable to our founding fathers, otherwise slavery would still be legal." So are you saying that we should tax one segment of the population to provide money and posessions to others?

      Your argument about slavery is sticky. The founders never said that we had a right to own slaves. In fact, to the contrary, the majority of the founders who owned slaves abhored slavery and hoped to find a solution for it, but the technology and economic system was not available at the time. After a few more decades, they found a solution and shed real blood to free the slaves. To try to say that providing "free" healthcare is the moral equivalent of freeing slaves is a weak argument at best. No slaves chose to be slaves, but many people choose to not pay for healthcare, to carry insurance, or to get an education and skills to acquire a job where that is a benefit. Why are those people "entitled" to something I had to work hard to earn?

    • 2 years ago
  • akamaial
  • Kylsport
  • hawk5000
    • 0
      hawk5000  

    • I don't think this is a very good comparison. The United States Government has always treated Native Americans like dirt. They never intended to do right by the native Americans.

    • 2 years ago
  • MoonLoon
    • 0
      MoonLoon  
    • hawk5000:

      "Hawk", I agree. However, corruption was the root cause of the institutionalised mistreatment of the Native people. "Indian Agents", appointed by Grant and his successors, were stealing from the gov't. while punishing the native people. The world has not changed very much. There is a federal beaurecrat waiting in the wings to take advantage of every program designed for the people and paid for by the people. These little cretins only know greed and injustice, they live and thrive on the misery of others, while attending D.C. balls and pretending to be masters of industry! They are of course supported by their real masters.

    • 2 years ago
  • Kylsport
  • akamaial
    • 0
      akamaial [removed]  

    • When a "small" (as opposed to the proposed "universal") health program such as this are as inefficiently and inadequately operated as this example, I have no vote of confidence of the now controversially proposed and "managed" national health care program will be any less of a disaster.
      Where government is involved, inefficiency reigns and to deny this as so is to ignore the current chaos within our government and the national economy today.

    • 2 years ago
  • MoonLoon
    • 0
      MoonLoon  

    • Not exactly a strong reccomendation for our Gov'ts. concern for the populance. Maybe fixing this problem is the first step toward gaining some credibility from the entire population.

    • 2 years ago
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