Jahi McMath lies in a hospital bed, declared to be
“brain-dead” by her doctors due to complications from a
tonsillectomy/adenoidectomy procedure. Children’s
Hospital Oakland and the McMath family have been entangled in a legal battle
over control of Jahi’s “body”, and whether she is actually alive or dead. This is a story that has received massive
national publicity.
A couple of elements in this story have been neglected, however. First, the current mortality rate for
tonsillectomy/adenoidectomy procedures is so low it cannot be calculated. Therefore, Jahi’s misfortune is almost
unheard of in the annals of modern medicine.
Second, 70% of the patients in Children’s Hospital Oakland
are on Medi-Cal, California’s version of the federal Medicaid program. The hospital
is continually in a state of financial desperation, since Medi-Cal only covers
20 cents for every dollar of hospital costs for treatment. Did this have some influence on the quality of
care Jahi received? The question
deserves to be asked.
It is possible that ignoring this question was just due to slipshod
reporting from all of the media outlets in the country. On the
other hand, perhaps the answer does not support the narrative that the Obama
administration’s healthcare takeover through the Affordable Care Act is
actually beneficial to patients.
A study
from the University of Virginia showed that patents on Medicare are 45% more
likely to die before leaving the hospital than patients with private
insurance. Medicaid patients are 93%
more likely to die under the same circumstances. In fact, patients on Medicaid were found to
have significantly higher hospital mortality rates than patients with no
insurance at all. Arguably, the results
of this study support the contention that as government involvement in
healthcare increases, quality of care decreases.
As 17 million additional patients are being thrown into
Medicaid through the ACA and we inch closer to Obama’s stated vision of a
“single payer” government-controlled system, Jahi McMath may be a canary in
America’s healthcare coal mine.
Andrew Thomas
aas published in American Thinker
No comments:
Post a Comment