A Heartless Ending for Tommy Davis

On Oct. 23, 2013, Doctors Stillman and Taylor, from the College of Medicine of the University of Louisville in Kentucky, published in The New England Journal of Medicine the tragedy suffered by a poor American: the case of Tommy Davis, the name being used to protect the patient’s identity.

Even though he had worked all his life, Tommy lacked medical insurance. Tommy was diagnosed with a bowel obstruction in the emergency room of a hospital. In the end, it turned out that he was suffering from colon cancer, a disease that was fortunately detected when the first symptoms began to appear.

Along with the $200 paid at every medical appointment, the patient was forced to pay an extra $10,000 for the attention that had been offered during that emergency, in which only the diagnosis was clarified. The authors of this essay report that the money spent in a short period of time in additional tests was everything the patient and his wife had been saving their whole lives.

Now, the doctors point out — against their wishes — that their patient is a “dead man walking” because as a poor man without insurance, it is impossible for him to receive the corresponding treatment that could help him heal.

This story is not an isolated case; it joins the approximately 45,000 Americans who, according to some media, die every year as a result of a lack of medical insurance. This figure may be quite conservative.

Medicare and Medicaid are the American government’s health insurance programs. The first is aimed at people over 65 years old, while the latter is for the poor and the disabled.

However, the cover is far from being universal for the American people since the allocated governmental budget is too meager to cope with the growing needs: There are increasingly more poor people within the society and, as everywhere, the population is growing old.

Given this situation, we can see the way in which unusual decisions are emerging, such as the one made in 2008 by the state of Oregon: Because only some 10 percent of Medicaid necessities could be covered, 10,000 insurance policies were auctioned among 90,000 option holders.

The consequences of such policies cloud the appearance of a power that claims to be civilized and developed. In October 2012, doctors from the departments of epidemiology and medicine at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore noticed that the risk of dying after an acute cardiovascular disease, such a heart attack, was rising among Americans without medical insurance. This warning was made in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, which is the official body of the Society of General Internal Medicine of the United States.

With regard to the health and the full rights of men, the differences between a society like ours and the northern country are colossal. An evidence of this is a recent exposition by Professor Ángel Gaspar Obregón Santos, head of the heart center of the Medical and Surgical Research Center of Havana, when he showed the results of his group. They have performed around 10,000 rescue operations aimed at the diagnosis and treatment of heart diseases, including coronariographies (studies of the heart arteries) and coronary angioplasties (repair of damaged heart arteries, which can cause diseases such as a heart attack).

Statistics amaze when we know that 97 percent of the interventions, also known as cardiovascular interventions, were successful. That means that over 96,000 Cubans did well coming out of them and lived longer thanks to these interventions.

These are not isolated data. We can inquire into many other results related to this field and that have been recently discussed in the national press. These results are related to the work carried out at the Ernesto Che Guevara heart center in Villa Clara; they performed over 300 heart interventions until September 2013, most of them being coronary revascularization, with the greatest survival rate in the country (97.7 percent).

Of course, Cubans nowadays do not need to turn their pockets inside out to see whether they can pay for medical treatment by themselves. Their lives and their relatives’ peace of mind will keep on being “insured” under a universe of humanism that is huge and contains stories such as Tommy Davis’.