by Sandy » Wed Apr 12, 2017 9:11 am
Emergency room care cannot, in any way, be equated to access to the kind of health care that is available for those who are affluent enough to afford the insurance to get it. An ER isn't going to provide chemotherapy or radiation treatments for cancer, dialysis, surgery beyond what is required for the emergency, treatment for the underlying causes of a heart attack, or provide any medication beyond what is immediately needed. And a lot of for-profit hospitals are getting out of the ER business by simply closing them down.
I'm old enough to remember when hospitals that had the names of Christian groups on them actually belonged to those groups. You can pick up an old Texas Baptist Annual and look through the reports of the Baptist hospitals and easily discern, from the mission and purpose statements, what Baptists believed about health care because they were putting a lot of money into caring for those who had no other means of getting it. The names are still, for the most part, on the hospitals, and the for-profit companies that operate them even use them to self-identify, but the charitable care is gone. I developed a chronic atrial fibrillation from a viral infection in my late 20's, and had trouble getting health insurance. When I lived close enough to Nashville, because I was an ordained Baptist minister, I could get treatment and care at the Baptist Hospital there, until it was sold to a conglomerate that also bought the Catholic hospital. Fortunately, my doctor got me enrolled in a program at Vanderbilt and I got treatment that way, and when I moved back to Texas, got transferred into one at the UT Texas Medical Center. I would most likely be dead now if I had to depend solely on emergency room treatment.
If the way most conservative, right wing Christians want to handle health care in the US were applied to the Bible, I wonder what the price tag would have been on Lazarus' resurrection? Jesus could have made a fortune.