Here's a Federal Health Care System For You

Let's see how well it works (from Don Surber):

AP: The federally funded Indian Health Service diagnosed this little girl as suffering depression. At age 5. She had cancer, and died some months later.

Longtime readers are used to my tales of actually death-by-government in the health care systems of Australia, Britain and Canada. The goal of those health-care systems is not to save lives, but to save money. Canadians even mock private care as “for profit” in the United States — until they need it.

But as Mary Clare Jalonick of the Associated Press reported, it happens here too.

American Indians have a federally funded health care system. It is as good as socialized medicine elsewhere. Jalonick reported:

On some reservations, the oft-quoted refrain is “don’t get sick after June,” when the federal dollars run out. It’s a sick joke, and a sad one, because it’s sometimes true, especially on the poorest reservations where residents cannot afford health insurance. Officials say they have about half of what they need to operate, and patients know they must be dying or about to lose a limb to get serious care.

Wealthier tribes can supplement the federal health service budget with their own money. But poorer tribes, often those on the most remote reservations, far away from city hospitals, are stuck with grossly substandard care. The agency itself describes a “rationed health care system.”

Jalonick reported on that little girl shown in her tribal dress, Ta’Shon Rain Little Light.

She loved to dance.

She also complained that her stomach hurt, until she stopped eating.

“When Stephanie Little Light took her daughter to the Indian Health Service clinic in this wind-swept and remote corner of Montana, they told her the 5-year-old was depressed,” Jalonick reported.

Her pain worsened. Eventually, she was flown to Denver after a lung collapsed.

She was finally diagnosed with terminal cancer.

“A few weeks later, a charity sent the whole family to Disney World so Ta’Shon could see Cinderella’s Castle, her biggest dream. She never got to see the castle, though. She died in her hotel bed soon after the family arrived in Florida,” Jalonick reported.

Maybe an earlier diagnosis might not have saved her. I don’t know. I am no doctor. But it seems to me that an earlier diagnosis would have at least gotten the girl to Disney World.

“The U.S. has an obligation, based on a 1787 agreement between tribes and the government, to provide American Indians with free health care on reservations. But that promise has not been kept. About one-third more is spent per capita on health care for felons in federal prison, according to 2005 data from the health service,” Jalonick reported.

That treaty predates the ratification of our Constitution by 2 years.

Here is an idea for President Obama: Fix this first.

What a doll, and what a terrible shame. Expect more of the same only magnified many times over if a public health care option comes into being.