http://abcnews.go.com/Health/insurance-24-year-dies-toothache/story?id=14438171&fb_ref=abc-fb-recs A 24-year-old Cincinnati father died from a tooth infection this week because he couldn't afford his medication, offering a sobering reminder of the importance of oral health and the number of people without access to dental or health care. According to NBC affiliate WLWT, Kyle Willis' wisdom tooth started hurting two weeks ago. When dentists told him it needed to be pulled, he decided to forgo the procedure, because he was unemployed and had no health insurance. When his face started swelling and his head began to ache, Willis went to the emergency room, where he received prescriptions for antibiotics and pain medications. Willis couldn't afford both, so he chose the pain medications. The tooth infection spread, causing his brain to swell. He died Tuesday. "When people are unemployed or don't have insurance, where do they go? What do they do?" Silverstein said. "People end up dying, and these are the most treatable, preventable diseases in the world." Getting access to dental care is particularly tough for low-income adults and children, and it's getting tougher as the economy worsens. In April, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that 33 percent of people surveyed skipped dental care or dental checkups because they couldn't afford them. A 2003 report by the U.S. Surgeon General found that 108 million Americans had no dental insurance, nearly 2.5 times the number who had no health insurance. "People want to believe there's a safety net that catches all of these people, and there isn't," said Dr. Glenn Stream, president-elect of the American Academy of Family Physicians. He noted that it is often young men who are the most likely to lack health coverage. Dr. Jim Jirjis, director of general internal medicine at Vanderbilt University, said people, like Willis, without access to care often die of conditions that were much more common decades ago. "He [Willis] might as well have been living in 1927," Jirjis said. "All of the advances we've made in medicine today and are proud of, for people who don't have coverage, you might as well never have developed those."
The outpouring of sympathy here over a young father's senseless death is underwhelming to say the least.
perhaps it were preventable, but it was his own fault for buying a cell phone over health insurance. He chose pain meds over anti-biotics when he had an infection. we don't know, do we? dental insurance is what, 50 bucks a month?
Or smoked. Or drank. Or did drugs. Or, since antibiotics are usually less than $20, could borrow the cash...
As someone who works in the dental community I'd say the chances he really could have obtained the meds are probably 99+%. Needless to say, there's a lot more to this story either you're not saying or the media is sensationalizing.
It sucks that this young guy died from a toothache (?), but just from the excerpt you posted the guy made 2 poor decisions that cost him his life, and shows two facts that show why reliance on gov't for your health is dangerous. Even for someone who didn't want to pay $80 to have a tooth pulled, he was able to go to the ER and get diagnosis and treatment options. The thought that "insurance is the only thing that's supposed to pay my health care costs" is partially responsible for what killed this guy. He didn't have insurance, but saw both a dentist and an ER doc for free, and if he would've spent $80 would have been able to have the problem solved. Or forking out <$50 at Target or Wal-Mart pharmacy for generic amoxacillin and pain meds. Same with the following boy: Wrong. His family not paying $80 kept Deamonte from having dental surgery. Meanwhile, this family that didn't want to pay $80 was able to get $250k of care later on, when it was too late to help. You're telling me that they couldn't have set up a payment plan for $7 a month over the course of a year to save their child's life? And with the (limited) fact-checking I've done with Medicare/Caid recently, I seem to recall that the only ways to lose Medicaid benefits right now are a) making too much, b) getting a bonus influx of money, c) not being part of an exempt group anymore (child, elderly, disabled, poor, etc) or d) not reporting changes in income, addresses, etc. How did the benefits go away?
I think you might be missing the point. Yes, if he'd understood the healthcare system well, and known what was important for his health, he could have easily gamed the system to get what he needed. But not everyone knows those things. It's easy to say, in hindsight, what he should have done. But naturally he didn't know his brain was going to swell up and kill him. And apparently he didn't understand that antibiotics would be important when it did. Would he have died in a country with national health care? I kind of doubt it. He would have gotten the tooth extracted. And barring that, he would have gotten both pain meds and antibiotics. Would saving his life have been a better outcome? Depends on how you feel about natural selection as applied to humans, I guess. He did make two poor decisions. Perhaps he deserved what he got. barfo
In these cases I think dentists should just write a prescription for about 80-100 Vicodin, and then the patient can go flip them around the way to make up the difference in the cost of that extraction.
Who said anything about "this administration" I'm talking about for profit insurance carriers ... and in for the record abortions are only covered by medicaid in 15 states (medicare ususally doesn't apply).
