Our immoral profit-driven healthcare system killed Shalynne, the daughter of Amy Vilela. She tells the story that brought her to Medicare for All and her activism.
I interviewed Amy at a Bernie Sanders headquarters in Las Vegas Nevada just before the state caucus. Amy Vilela said that after her daughter’s death she knew she had to give up what she was doing to make this her cause celebre. Her support for Medicare for All is necessarily unwavering.
She recounts how immoral healthcare system kills daughter
After a long interstate drive to Nevada, Shalynne, Amy Vilela’s daughter, leg swole up, turned very red and was very painful. She knew something was wrong and went to the hospital.
The first thing the hospital asked for was health insurance, not about her health. Shalynne did not realize she was still insured and said she thought she did not have insurance. Amy said the hospital coaxed her daughter to leave.
By the time she was seen again, Shalynne had developed a severe deep vein thrombosis. As Amy Vilela explained in her video, her daughter died soon thereafter.
When one goes to a hospital, doctor, or emergency room, why is it that before any care is provided, insurance and payment are the first questions? At the time of maximum health uncertainty and vulnerability that is not only inhumane but evil.
The irony of this story is that Shalynne’s great grandfather was Roscoe Lewis McKinney, founder of the department of anatomy at the College of Medicine at Howard University. When his great-grandaughter needed help, an inhumane healthcare system failed her. This should not happen in the richest country in the world where the resources are there to provide healthcare for every American.
Amy Vilela closed with the most profound statement.
“Once you see evil,” Aby said. “If you do nothing about it then you are complicit.
Too many see the evil but continue, mostly for a false ideology, and willful acceptance of corporate deceivers’ false narratives, to slow the path to Medicare for All.
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What is supposed to happen is triage first, then look at billing information. If someone is spurting blood from a severed femoral artery, billing taking billing information wouldn’t get a full address before the patient loses consciousness and couldn’t even pat shirt and jacket pockets before death would occur.
Alas, triage still remains variable in far too many hospitals, so someone with a life threatening circulatory issue gets ignored and dies – preventably and the hospital then gripes that they’re being sued for malpractice and a preventable death.
An example of how it is supposed to work. I had collapsed several times, with altered level of consciousness. Upon presentation to the ED, my resting pulse was 135, BP 250/185 and I was immediately admitted. My wife was hijacked by the clerk for billing information, which laughably, the clerk fouled up, resulting in the insurance not initially paying the bill.
Three days later, hyperthyroidism and hypertension was addressed, the essential hypertension being exasperated by Grave’s disease (autoimmune hyperthyroidism) and I was discharged.
What didn’t happen was a billing clerk having an opinion, based upon zero medical training, that I looked OK, which I did look OK. The triage nurse did nearly drop her pen when she saw the pulse and BP…