Posted on 01/18/2010 10:02:51 AM PST by Mount Athos
During my last night’s shift in the ER, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient with a shiny new gold tooth, multiple elaborate tattoos, a very expensive brand of tennis shoes and a new cellular telephone equipped with her favorite R&B; tune for a ring tone.
Glancing over the chart, one could not help noticing her payer status: Medicaid.
She smokes more than one costly pack of cigarettes every day and, somehow, still has money to buy beer. And our President expects me to pay for this woman’s health care?
Our nation’s health care crisis is not a shortage of quality hospitals, doctors or nurses. It is a crisis of culture – a culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on vices while refusing to take care of one’s self or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance.
A culture that thinks I can do whatever I want to because someone else will always take care of me.
Life is really not that hard. Most of us reap what we sow.
Starner Jones, MD Jackson, MS
This Letter to the Editor, written by Doctor Jones about health care in America, is from the August 29th edition of Jackson, Mississippi’s newspaper, the Clarion Ledger.
Doctor Roger Starner Jones is a seventh generation Mississippian and his extracurricular interests are golf, hunting, fishing and college football. He specializes in emergency medicine at The University of Mississippi medical Center.
It is the same with people who have or have had children or family members with long term expensive illnesses. Invariably you end up in a semiprivate room with a welfare recipient who is loud, rude and entitled to everything for free.
“It is a crisis of culture—a culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on vices while refusing to take care of oneself or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance...A culture that thinks ‘I can do whatever I want to because someone else will always take care of me’.”
Kinda agree but not sure where he wants to go with this. Please don’t suggest legislation against vices, Doc, or forced purchasing of said insurance...
I see this every day. I teach high school and nearly all of my students are on reduced or free breakfast and lunch. One day a girl walked in with a new “perm” (straightened hair - very costly) and announced to me that she’d been approved for her free lunch and breakfast!
Can’t wait to see the reply letters to that, calling him a rich elitist doctor, and of course racist, assuming he is white.
Oh, except it’s from August.
allow me to take this opportunity to opine that any generation that spends as much on tattoos as this one has is...probably not salvageable.
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