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Thursday, Oct 9, 2014 6:00 PM UTC
Republicans are Ebola hypocrites: What they really think of public health
Republicans slash public health funding -- then blame Obama for the crisis? Here's why he needs to call them out
Topics: President Obama, ebola, Republicans, 2014 elections, AIDS, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Thomas Eric Duncan, Gov. Rick Perry, Editor's Picks, Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, Elections News, News, Politics News
President Obama’s critics are right: He never should have reassured Americans that Ebola was “unlikely” to arrive in the U.S. He should have known better. He ought to have told Americans that our still spotty healthcare system, in which hospitals routinely deny diligent treatment to people who don’t have insurance, and profile along lines of race and class, virtually insures that we’ll have an inadequate response to any public health crisis.
Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to develop Ebola in the U.S. – four other people are being treated in American hospitals – is the only patient to die of the disease here. He’s also the only patient who was uninsured. He turned up in a Dallas emergency room, informed the staff he was from Liberia, and was sent home with antibiotics.
Even when he was readmitted and diagnosed with Ebola, he got an experimental drug late. And he was the only patient who didn’t receive the additional experimental protocol of a blood transfusion from someone who had recovered from Ebola.
“The real elephant in the room is, the man was black, he had no insurance, and therefore he was basically turned away,” Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is African American, told the Los Angeles Times. The hospital, for its part, denies it treated Duncan differently than insured patients.
It’s probably no accident, either, that it happened in Rick Perry’s Texas. More than 1.5 million Texans, with a median income of $833, are going uninsured because Perry rejected Medicaid funding. Medicaid wouldn’t have helped Duncan, but it might help someone exposed to him. Right now Youngor Jallah, the woman who got Duncan to the hospital when his symptoms worsened, says she doesn’t have Medicaid or any health insurance.
Presumably she’s being monitored by health officials and will be treated if she becomes symptomatic, but she’s not certain. “It’s my worry … that I will be treated the same way” as Duncan, Jallah told the Los Angeles Times.
State public health officials also warn that Texas isn’t prepared for a public health emergency. “We don’t really have a unifying construct for public health in Texas that’s comprehensive,” Dr. Eduardo Sanchez, the former commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services, told the Texas Tribune. Between 2008 and 2013, 36 percent of local health departments in Texas had to lay off staff due to budget cuts between 2008 and 2013.
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