The emotional punchline of Michael Moore’s film comes when the film profiles civilian 9/11 rescue workers who had to hold raffles for medicine. Being volunteers, the government refused to cover their ground zero-related illnesses. It hurt to watch these guys who stood up and answered the call, who sacrificed themselves for America, discarded like yesterday’s trash. One of them described his medical limbo as if the government was just holding off dealing with his problems, waiting for him to die.
It turns out that by drawing a line between these volunteers and paid government employees, Moore didn’t go far enough.
Almost six years after the terrorist attack on New York, the federal government still does not have an adequate array of health programs for ground zero workers — or a reliable estimate of how much treating their illnesses will cost — according to a federal report released yesterday.
The report, produced by the Government Accountability Office, an arm of Congress, concluded that thousands of federal workers and responders who came to ground zero from other parts of the country do not have access to suitable health programs.
These people represent everything that is good about America. Now, thanks to our glorious best-in-the-world health system, they lack even basic care. While a select few Americans get to choose their doctors (within the network of course) and get surgery when they want it (assuming that the claims manager, who is paid to refuse payment, approves), the heroes of 9/11 sit around without care, waiting to die.
There’s nothing particularly new about this news. Americans get turned away from hospitals every day. Patients pass on all over the country because keeping them alive costs more than delaying payment until they die. Americans like to hang up images of our heroes, pose for pictures with them and imagine in some way that we’re like them. In falling through the gaping cracks in our medical system the 9/11 first responders have indeed become quintessentially American.
***Update***
And again.
[Mike] Helms, 31, a civilian counterintelligence expert with the Army’s 902nd Military Intelligence Group, had been sent to Iraq in 2004 to help fill a critical intelligence gap in the area known as the Sunni Triangle. While in Iraq, he lived with soldiers and ate military rations, took fire from mortar rounds and small arms, and clocked hundreds of miles manning a machine gun on the back of a Humvee.Nevertheless, his status as an Army civilian would leave him stranded in the aftermath of the June 16, 2004, attack, when the bomb hit his Humvee so hard it blew his M-60 off its turret.
In the months that followed, Helms recalled, he was denied vital care for his wounds — ranging from shrapnel in his left arm to traumatic brain injury. Forced to rely on federal workers’ compensation and turned away from regular care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military hospitals, Helms has faced years of frustration grappling with bureaucracies unprepared to help a government civilian wounded in combat.
Greatest health care in the world.
***Update 2***
Read this Washington Post story on the wonderful new trend of physcian profiling by the insurance industry. Doctors who run afoul of the algorithm get demoted to undesirable status and cost more for insured patients to visit. Yet some demoted doctors don’t have a history of poor care. Is there a problem with the algorithm? Who knows, the whole thing is proprietary.
But ask yourself a simple question – from the perspective of an insurance company, what is the most important question about a doctor? Insurance companies exist to make money. Patients might prefer doctors who offer better care, but insurance companies prefer doctors who cost them less money. It doesn’t take a genius to expect that the algorithm serves the entity that created it and keeps its details secret.