To any of you who think that you don't get turned away at the emergency room if you don't have insurance or medicaid or medicare, you need to work with homeless youth who have no coverage.
Here in Alameda County if you don't have any coverage, you can only go to Highland Hospital in Oakland. This county is very large and it can take over 2 hours in traffic to reach Highland if you are in the eastern part of the county. But if you have no coverage, you have NO choice.
If you are in an emergency, yes they will stabilize you at another hospital but once you are "stabilized" (and "stable" is defined by the hospital in question, not you) you are taken to Highland Hospital.
Now, I've been to Highland Hospital with my clients. I've waited over six hours to see anyone with my clients who have been stabbed or had broken limbs. Even a bullet wound is no guarantee of immediate emergency care there. Since this is the "County Hospital" and they MUST take all of the people who are not covered, they are swamped with patients 24/7. And they are highly under-funded. That means that you do get sub-standard care and you must wait sometimes even ten hours to be seen (one of my clients stayed overnight once in their waiting room at the emergency room). And the hospital is encouraged to discharge you ASAP, whether or not you've had adequate care. All they have to do is prove they've given "some" care, even if it's just a prescription for hydrocodone (vicodin) or tylenol with codeine.
And follow-ups are almost impossible to schedule. If you have an ongoing problem after the emergency and you are forced to go to Highland for ongoing care, you will wait months for an appointment. And if you are lucky enough to get an appointment you will not be seen at the time you are actually scheduled. You will have to wait a couple of hours because the doctor most likely is way over-booked.
And let's talk dental, shall we? There are clinics that will provide free cleaning. They might fill small cavities, maybe. But they will NOT do extractions if they are at all complicated. Most of my clients who are 18-25 years old need their wisdom teeth extracted. These clinics won't do it. Therefore, they get infected. And if they get infected and it becomes an emergency, they are forced to go to Highland Hospital where they will wait a minimum of six hours to be seen. So instead of taking care of the problem and preventing an emergency, the system has created an expensive emergency it will largely ignore if you let it.
I've found one place in the area that will see people for prescribing eye glasses and providing them free of charge if they have no coverage and are poor enough.
The thing is, you have to make next to nothing in order to receive any of these services. I'm talking about $12,000 or less. You cannot live anywhere in the Bay Area on that kind of money. If you make more, you will lose your benefits (Medicaid and SSI if you have it). Also if you have SSI you cannot have any more than $2000 to your name or you get cut off. This keeps people poor who are on the system because there is NO incentive to make more because all you'll be is like me, working poor and barely able to make the bills. At least if you qualify for SSI and Medicaid you are guaranteed health care and you can even qualify for section 8. It's actually more stable than to be working poor in fear of losing your job and not being able to make bills if you do...
So, all you people who think that the situation is just fine and that you cannot be denied adequate care don't have to deal with the system at all or you would think differently because you would know from experience that getting care is extremely difficult and most likely you will be under-treated.
It's easy for people who are truly middle class and who have health care and who have never had to experience what it is like to be without health care to think that everything is fine.
The true middle class is actually small. Middle class means that you have a good paying job where you are able to save something for emergencies and you can save for retirement.
Most of us are working poor. We live off of credit and/or live paycheck to paycheck working at jobs that pay just above the actual poverty level (not the ill-conceived federal poverty level).
And even people in the real middle class can face a catastrophe if they lose their job, have a lapse in coverage, and experience the onset of a catastrophic and disabling illness. Suddenly, you'd be singing a different tune about universal healthcare.
