Obama Health Care Will Prevent Death

The New York Times continues to become less relevant every day.  In this tearjerker of a story, Nicholas Kristof equates the story of a Lupus sufferer’s death with the idea that she would have been better off if she would have been in prison.

In the debate over health care, here’s an inequity to ponder: Nikki White would have been far better off if only she had been a convicted bank robber.

Nikki White died at the age of 32. She had lupus, a chronic inflammatory disease that was untreated because she could not afford health insurance.

Nikki was a slim and athletic college graduate who had health insurance, had worked in health care and knew the system. But she had systemic lupus erythematosus, a chronic inflammatory disease that was diagnosed when she was 21 and gradually left her too sick to work. And once she lost her job, she lost her health insurance.

Please understand , my dear readers, that I am not making light of Ms. White’s plight and I have nothing but great empathy for her family and their loss.  I would not wish that situation on anyone.  Mr. Kristof exploits this sad tale to push Obama’s The Times agenda of a government-controlled health care program.  Ms White’s death is unfortunate, but to equate this medical disease as terminal without health insurance intervention is distorted at best.

The Mayo Clinic reports

Treatment for lupus depends on your signs and symptoms. Determining whether your signs and symptoms should be treated and what medications to use requires a careful discussion of the benefits and risks with your doctor. As your signs and symptoms flare and subside, you and your doctor may find that you’ll need to change medications or dosages.

Common medications used to treat lupus
Three types of drugs are commonly used to treat lupus when your signs and symptoms are mild or moderate. More aggressive lupus may require more aggressive drugs. In general, when first diagnosed with lupus, your doctor may discuss these medications:

• Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Aspirin or other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as naproxen sodium (Aleve) and ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin, others) may be used to treat a variety of signs and symptoms associated with lupus.
• Antimalarial drugs. Although there’s no known relationship between lupus and malaria, these medications have proved useful in treating signs and symptoms of lupus.
• Corticosteroids. These drugs counter the inflammation of lupus, but can have serious long-term side effects, including weight gain, easy bruising, thinning bones (osteoporosis), high blood pressure, diabetes and increased risk of infection.

Treatment for specific signs and symptoms
What treatments you may consider depend on your signs and symptoms. Treatments for specific signs and symptoms include:

• Joint pain and swelling. Pain in your joints may be initially controlled with NSAIDs.
• Skin rashes. Avoid skin rashes by staying out of the sun, wearing sunblock year-round and keeping your skin covered.
• Fatigue. Fatigue is treated by determining the underlying cause. Your fatigue may be caused by difficulty sleeping, depression or poorly controlled pain.
• Swelling around the heart and lungs. Swelling around your heart and lungs that causes chest pain may be controlled NSAIDs, antimalarial drugs or corticosteroids.

Treatment for aggressive lupus
Life-threatening cases of lupus — those including kidney problems, inflammation in the blood vessels, and central nervous system problems, such as seizures — may require more aggressive treatment. In these cases, you and your doctor may consider:

• High-dose corticosteroids. High-dose corticosteroids can be taken orally or administered through a vein in your arm (intravenously).
• Immunosuppressive drugs. Drugs that suppress the immune system may be helpful in serious cases of lupus, but can cause serious side effects.

High-dose corticosteroids can be combined with immunosuppressive drugs to reduce the dosage of each drug, which may reduce the risk of side effects. Sometimes, even with aggressive treatment, your kidneys may fail. In that case, you may need kidney dialysis or, if kidney failure is permanent, a kidney transplant.

Kristof actually agrees with the Mayo clinic, but hits his prison slant again.

Under a doctor’s care, lupus should be manageable. Indeed, if Nikki had been a felon, the problem could have been averted, because courts have ruled that prisoners are entitled to medical care.

Did he just say that if Nikki had been in prison, she could have been cured?  Just what is Kristof’s obsession with prison?  Is he really advocating breaking the law to obtain health coverage?  I don’t get it.  Again, Kristof bends the truth to extract an emotional response from his readers.  Many suffers do manage their disease through traditional medical treatments and others, with holistic approaches including diet, exercise and nutrition.  Even if Ms White and the thousands of other Lupus suffers HAD health insurance, many of them will still die every year.  I am not meaning to be insensitive, just factually accurate.

Kristoff doesn’t stop there,

Complex arguments are being batted around in this health care debate, but the central issue isn’t technical but moral. The first question is simply this: Do we wish to be the only rich nation in the world that lets a 32-year-old woman die because she can’t get health insurance? Is that really us?

So am I to believe that only uninsured Lupus sufferers in the United States die? Again, Kristof plays to the heart strings.  Did this woman die as a causal effect of not having health insurance?  We will never know.  But Kristof is being as disingenuous as John Edwards during Kerry/Edwards Presidential bid when he victimized Christopher Reeve’s paralysis as a means to win the election. Remember when John Edwards said:

“If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”

As Charles Krauthammer commented; “Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately, for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable”.  True then and still true today.

Continuing with the NY Times playbook, Kristof gets in the predictable dig, it’s still President Bush’s fault too.

After Al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans, eight years ago on Friday, we went to war and spent hundreds of billions of dollars ensuring that this would not happen again. Yet every two months, that many people die because of our failure to provide universal insurance — and yet many members of Congress want us to do nothing?

Kristof then forges ahead with this proposal:

My suggestion for anyone in Nikki’s situation: commit a crime and get locked up. In Washington State, a 20-year-old inmate named Melissa Matthews chose to turn down parole and stay in prison because that was the only way she could get treatment for her cervical cancer. “If I’m out, I’m going to die from this cancer,” she told a television station.

If I understand Mr. Krsitof hypothesis correctly, convicted felons have better health coverage then law-abiding citizens.  If that is correct, then we should shift our focus onto the prison health care system.  Perhaps, the millions of dollars that we spend on health care for convicted criminals would be better used on those people who actually obey the law. Another incentive for people not to break the law.  Go to prison, no health care for you. Just a thought.

Even if the Democratic-controlled congress passed a government run health bill with every aspect that President Obama proposes, with every medical option available to every person in the United States, Lupus sufferers, like all the rest of us, are still going to die, every day.

Sorry to break the news to you, Nick.

Tags: health, health care bill, health care reform