Healthcare in the U.S. is a national disaster. People are dying or getting sicker because of this.
My neighbor Lynn, who is unemployed and uninsured, with no source of income beyond food stamps, has been trying for weeks to get our county social services department to give her a medical voucher to see an eye doctor, but they keep stalling and screwing things up.
She can no longer see well enough to drive or even read. She has diabetes and other medical conditions, but she can't qualify for Social Security disability and Medicaid until an eye doctor certifies her as visually impaired. She's afraid her eyes will worsen because of the delays, causing her to lose her sight permanently. She worked for years at IBM, but got laid off and has had trouble finding work since then, mostly because of her health and the economy.
On Sunday she started having symptoms in one eye that might have been a detached retina (which is a medical emergency).
She was taken to the local hospital ER, where they consulted with an ophthalmologist about her. He arranged to see her as a charity case because of the seriousness of her condition. It turns out that both of her retinas are hemorrhaging. He did an injection into one eye to slow or stop the hemorrhaging. The other eye isn't as bad, but he will give it an injection next week. She has absolutely no way to pay for this. She's been living with our other neighbor, who receives disability and Medicaid because of a severe neck injury, and lives in his late mother's house.
Lynn potentially could still wind up blind. All because our underfunded social services department in Montgomery County, MD, one of the wealthier counties in the nation, didn't seem to recognize the seriousness of her situation.
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