Becuase Everything Else Sucks

Lack of Healthcare Results in Boy Dying of Toothache

By Manila Ryce
Published Friday, March 2nd, 2007, 5:29 am
Filed under: Human Rights, Health, Economic, Society/Culture, US Politics

Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver’s mother was uninsured and his family had lost its Medicaid. When Deamonte developed a toothache, the bacteria from the abscess eventually spread to his brain and killed him. After two operations and six weeks of hospital care, Deamonte’s death could now set his family back more than $250,000, an impossible amount of money for a family unable to afford the initial $80 tooth extraction. Deamonte’s death underscores the debate over universal health coverage on a whole, especially that of dental care.

Many American children from low-income families have to travel three hours to see a dentist willing to take Medicaid patients, while others go without coverage at all. In 2005, less than one in three children in Maryland’s Medicaid program received any dental service. Elsewhere in the region, as many as 75 percent of children may go without coverage. Poor children are more than twice as likely to have cavities as their peers, but far less likely to get treatment. In Deamonte’s case, his mother was focused on getting a dentist for his younger brother, who got in for a tooth cleaning, but had trouble getting an oral surgeon for his six rotted teeth.

It was on Jan. 11 that Deamonte came home from school complaining of a headache. At Southern Maryland Hospital Center, his mother said, he got medicine for a headache, sinusitis and a dental abscess. But the next day, he was much sicker.

Eventually, he was rushed to Children’s Hospital, where he underwent emergency brain surgery. He began to have seizures and had a second operation. The problem tooth was extracted.

After more than two weeks of care at Children’s Hospital, the Clinton seventh-grader began undergoing six weeks of additional medical treatment as well as physical and occupational therapy at another hospital. He seemed to be mending slowly, doing math problems and enjoying visits with his brothers and teachers from his school, the Foundation School in Largo.

Deamonte’s mother, Alyce Driver, said she’s had jobs at a bakery, doing construction, and in home health-care, but none of them have ever provided routine dental care for her children. At the time of Deamonte’s hospitalization, his Medicaid coverage had temporarily lapsed and even with Medicaid dental care, the problem was finding it. The family had just got out of a temporary stay in a homeless shelter, and were running into endless barriers to get the boys the coverage they needed.

On their last day together, Deamonte appeared to be happy, playing cards and watching television with his mother, lying with him in his hospital bed. After going home that night, Alyce received a call from Deamonte telling her, “Make sure you pray before you go to sleep.”

The next morning she received another call from the boy’s grandmother, telling her Deamonte was unresponsive. “When I got there, my baby was gone,” Alyce recounted. Doctors are still unsure why the boy died, but his death certificate lists two conditions associated with brain infections: “meningoencephalitis” and “subdural empyema.”

source

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One Response to “Lack of Healthcare Results in Boy Dying of Toothache”

  1. My heart is absolutely broken…and it should be!

    The next time some jerk tells me about America having the best healthcare system in the world one or both of us will have to go to the emergency room and at least one of us will have to go to jail. it does NOT matter how good it is if you have no access to it until it is too late as in the case of Deamonte. This precious child who lies dead tonight in a nation that claims to have the best healthcare in the world is proof positive that in this nation’s healthcare is only for the well-to-do PERIOD. The United States is the only industrialized modern nation that has no national health care plan. That is not by accident. It is by design. The death of little Deamonte is an indictment of the whole damned health delivery system.

    The lying scum of the medical community (AMA etc) and PhRMA etc. have reached my absolute limit of patience.

    On TV we are bombarded by commercials from the pharmaceuticals with ads for their latest miracle drug. They are sure to end their commercials with the empty assertion that if you the viewer cannot afford their medications the pharmaceutical in question may be able to help them with the cost of the drugs.

    What they fail to tell you is that they have the extra money for these commercials because they are reaping the biggest windfall profit in their history from the money that they are receiving from Medicare D.

    Medicare Part D is legislation written by the PhRMA lobbyists to see that their bosses would begin to be paid by a combination of private funds and tax dollars for drugs that many under Medicare used to receive FREE through their so-called Patient Assistance Programs. The pharmaceuticals are experiencing a huge windfall from Medicare Part D in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

    You may have also begun to see commercials paid for by, you guessed it PhRMA, defending the Medicare Part D golden goose that they have foisted off on America as an answer to providing drug coverage to Medicare participants. These lying ads assert that the government negotiating for drug prices, as the Veteran’s Administration does now, would somehow be disastrous. It would be disastrous for their thieving windfall profits under Medicare Part D. The pharmaceuticals give less than a damn about Americans getting medications at reasonable prices. Americans pay more for the SAME drugs than any other country on the planet.

    Until We the People DEMAND that our national government get off the PhRMA and Medical Association lobbyist dole and set up as real healthcare system that is available to all Americans there will be more Deamonte’s and old folks and working folks that die needlessly.

    The only reason that things are the way that they are is that Big Business in all its nefarious forms and the uber wealthy of the top 5% of Americans are allowed to suck the life’s blood out of working men and women in this land. The truth about our capitalist system is that it works just about as poorly as the socialist systems that we have demonized over the last 50 to 60 years.

    My fellow Americans, please don’t take my word for any of this. Do NOT take the word of the pharmaceuticals though, they have no reason to tell the truth. Don’t take the word of anyone in the AMA either. Any group that runs ads telling us, the average American, that we are all in the same boat together has no credibility. Research it for yourself. Get the truth and it the truth will make you free.

    Please help to see that there will be as few more Deamonte’s as is humanly possible. It’s just not right and you all know it.

    iamapilgrim
    03/2/07 at 8:23 pm

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