In the meantime, this is the news I'm catching up on today:
"What happens when chronically ill kids grow up?" -- A June article in the Houston Press explains the gap in health care for disabled children who come of age. It's an important topic I haven't seen covered in such depth before, but, hello... the "first large generation of chronically ill pediatric patients to reach adulthood"? I'll be 40 in October, and I'm really tired of hearing how all the seriously disabled children before now died before needing adult health care. We're here. We've been here. A number of us have even been blogging online for quite some time. It's just that we're mostly invisible to the mainstream media.
"Girls parents and agency face charges in starvation" -- Danieal Kelly of Philadelphia was 14. She died in 2006 and the charges have just now been filed. Mark at The 19th Floor writes about Danieal and the grand jury indictment (pdf file with one very graphic photo) of nine people for her needless suffering and death.
"Immigrants facing deportation by U.S. hospitals" -- From a NYT series on how the government and others "compel illegal immigrants to leave the United States." Here's an excerpt:
Eight years ago, Mr. Jiménez, 35, an illegal immigrant working as a gardener in Stuart, Fla., suffered devastating injuries in a car crash with a drunken Floridian. A community hospital saved his life, twice, and, after failing to find a rehabilitation center willing to accept an uninsured patient, kept him as a ward for years at a cost of $1.5 million.
What happened next set the stage for a continuing legal battle with nationwide repercussions: Mr. Jiménez was deported — not by the federal government but by the hospital, Martin Memorial. After winning a state court order that would later be declared invalid, Martin Memorial leased an air ambulance for $30,000 and “forcibly returned him to his home country,” as one hospital administrator described it. . . .
Mr. Jiménez’s benchmark case exposes a little-known but apparently widespread practice. Many American hospitals are taking it upon themselves to repatriate seriously injured or ill immigrants because they cannot find nursing homes willing to accept them without insurance. Medicaid does not cover long-term care for illegal immigrants, or for newly arrived legal immigrants, creating a quandary for hospitals, which are obligated by federal regulation to arrange post-hospital care for patients who need it.
American immigration authorities play no role in these private repatriations, carried out by ambulance, air ambulance and commercial plane. Most hospitals say that they do not conduct cross-border transfers until patients are medically stable and that they arrange to deliver them into a physician’s care in their homeland. But the hospitals are operating in a void, without governmental assistance or oversight, leaving ample room for legal and ethical transgressions on both sides of the border.
Indeed, some advocates for immigrants see these repatriations as a kind of international patient dumping, with ambulances taking patients in the wrong direction, away from first-world hospitals to less-adequate care, if any.
“Repatriation is pretty much a death sentence in some of these cases,” said Dr. Steven Larson, an expert on migrant health and an emergency room physician at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. “I’ve seen patients bundled onto the plane and out of the country, and once that person is out of sight, he’s out of mind.”
"Taking the long way around" -- From Oceanside, California, an example of how higher gas prices and budget cuts that have led to more crowded public transit is pushing wheelchair users off the bus. We'll be hearing more stories like this, I suspect.
They're two main ways that the media portray women who have disabilities. It's either kind of passive, needing help, victim, suffering. You hear a lot of those words, wheelchair-bound, these negative-word connotations. ... On the other hand, women with disabilities who have done pretty well for themselves are put up on a pedestal. I think sometimes that's a bad thing, too.
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