Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Below the knee--Letter #15

Dear Governor Ducey,

You never met my grandma, did you? Well, you couldn’t have, because she’s dead. She died poor and in a crappy nursing home. They had to cut off her leg below the knee because instead of putting cold compresses on the leg upon which the surgeons operated, they put the compresses on her good leg. The cold compresses melted and soaked through her socks, through her skin, into her leg. Her leg turned gangrenous. They had to cut it off. She died a few days later, mainly because amputation is major surgery and older people have a hard time with surgery. She was old but the substandard care she experienced probably took a number of years off her life.


When I think of the 500,000 people getting cut off from Medicaid who will be lucky to fin substandard care, if they can receive any health care at all, thanks to your new “solution” to our budget problems, I think of my grandma and her losing her good leg. The way that, if someone had seen the big picture, had any foresight, cared one tiny bit for the well-being of this woman, that maybe they would have done something differently. Moved the wet cloths off her good foot, for example. Maybe if you cared about the well-being of the people, you would do the relatively simple thing and raise taxes. Or, perhaps you truly believe only the rich deserve good health care and education. Well, I guess the prisons have doctors, right? And sometimes a library, if they’re lucky. The poor can count on that, at least.  

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