The Government Dodge on Health Care

The recent dismay expressed in citizen reaction to the failure of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department to seize a suspected robbery and drunk-driving suspect to save their fellow citizens from the burden of paying for $37,000 worth of medical care demonstrates the inconsistency of public reaction to the acts of irresponsibility that are regularly condoned on each Election Day.

Where were the outraged citizens when the Orange County Board of Supervisors presented the taxpayers with millions of dollars in tax savings by selling the county hospital? Come to think of it, the old county hospital had a jail ward, in addition to providing for the taxpayers’ responsibility for indigent care.

But we really can’t blame the supervisors for a process that began when Gov. Reagan rescued the taxpayers of California from the responsibility to underwrite indigent medical care with reasonable compensation. The process began the transfer of this burden from the state to the county, and this process has been refined by subsequent administrations to fall upon fewer and fewer people.

By creating Indigent Medical Services, the paltry benefits of Medi-Cal services were made to seem princely--10% of usual reimbursement versus 30% to 40%--and yet to come is realignment, latest jargon for the escape from responsibility and voter wrath. Give it a name, come up with a slogan and the taxpayers will forever reelect the couturiers of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Don’t the providers of health care recognize the opportunity provided by their fellow citizens to privatize public service? Now that advertising and marketing are part of competition in the provision of health-care services, hospitals have the chance to incorporate “new stark and sanitary jail ward services, complete with disposable handcuffs and leg irons” in their promotional literature.

Our elected public officials have given all of us in the health-care field the opportunity to be one of the “Thousand Points of Light” in the Milky Way of responsibility abdication. We look for someone else to shoulder our burden.

Where illumination and warmth are needed, we live increasingly in the night, comforted by the stars, instead of welcoming the heat and light of the sun. But don’t mention anything as central as the sun is to our solar system to the 32% of physicians who feel no responsibility to treat patients with AIDS.

Universal health care means more health-care costs, more central government, more responsibility for our fellow man.

LAURENCE LEWIN, MD, Garden Grove