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From Fox News, Elderly couple found dead in apparent murder-suicide, note says they could not afford medical care:
A Washington state man allegedly killed himself after killing his wife, and left a note for authorities saying that he was driven to do so because they could not afford to pay for medical care for her serious health conditions.
The man, identified by the Whatcom County Medical Examiner Gary Goldfogel in a statement to Fox News as Brian S. Jones, was 77, and his wife, Patricia Whitney-Jones, was 76.
[...] "It's very tragic that one of our senior citizens would find himself in such desperate circumstances where he felt murder and suicide were the only option," [Whatcom County Sheriff Bill Elfo] said. "Help is always available with a call to 9-1-1."
"We do what we can to help them," Elfo added in a telephone interview with Fox News. "We can't solve all their healthcare needs, but we can help them until a better day comes."
Elfo said he has seen people close to him struggle with healthcare issues and get exasperated fighting what can be a bureaucratic system.
"I know it gets very frustrating," the sheriff said, "you can get very easily worn down, and [roadblocks] build up over and over again."
From WSWS (ICFI/SEP), Elderly husband kills wife, then himself, in desperation over skyrocketing healthcare costs:
Police found the notes, which explained what had happened. Jones' wife, Patricia Whitney-Jones, suffered from serious health problems, and the couple could not afford medical care. Jones, an apparent Navy veteran, wrote directions as to how police could contact their next of kin. Police found the couple's two dogs and turned them over to the Humane Society.
The home was not located in a forgotten, impoverished area but in a semi-rural neighborhood near the Cascade Mountains where homes are valued in the $400,000 range. The bottom 90 percent of people in "the richest country in the world" are living under financial hardship that varies only in terms of degree.
[...] [The couple's next-door neighbor, Sherrie Schulteis] further noted:
"But here is the horribleness of this whole thing, less than 6 months ago our across the street neighbor shot himself, a young man with PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder], cops and SWAT all lined our street then too. He was young--in his 50's-- and this guy and the whole block knew and saw him riding his bike, or walking his tiny dog also. He lived directly across from our house and we talked with him everyday as we were outside a lot. We had no idea his PTSD would kick in and he started believing everyone was someone else and he was going to kill everyone."
Also at People and The Lynden Tribune (EU blocked)
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 13 2019, @08:45AM (10 children)
MAGA baby. The shining city on the hill. You sick people shut the fuck up.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 13 2019, @08:49AM (9 children)
How can you blame Trump? He tried to repeal the laws that caused this but was stopped by the "other team" and Mccain. Unless you are saying it is all just theatre?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 13 2019, @09:08AM (4 children)
So you say if that man had not had an insurance in the first place, he would have been able to afford the health cost? I don't think so.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 13 2019, @11:23AM (3 children)
>Implying health cost isn't artificially inflated by insurance since everyone that mattered has it anyway
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday August 13 2019, @03:07PM (2 children)
>Implying health expenses are all just artificial inflation without having the slightest idea how much actual care collectively costs in actual dollars, nor any real knowledge of what such care would cost a person without an expense mediator.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 13 2019, @03:26PM (1 child)
>Implying expense mediators work for free
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday August 16 2019, @11:50AM
>Implying you have no idea what the term "expense mediator" means. Hint: It ain't a person. Answer: Insurance or some other method of collectively sharing the risk and expenses of healthcare (like nationalized healthcare).
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Tuesday August 13 2019, @06:50PM (2 children)
Trump has been promising to fix healthcare since before he was elected. So far all he's proposed is Hey, lets go ahead and jump out of this airplane, we can invent a parachute on the way down.
Obamacare is actually an improvement over what we had before, it's just a woefully inadequate band-aid that has failed to get at the roots of the problem. But it was the only thing that could be (barely) rammed past Congress.
The problems go well past just insurance. The entire healthcare industry is deeply screwed up when it comes to costs and billing. If getting an oil change for your car was like a medical procedure, you'd get a bill from the garage, another from the guy changing the oil, another for the oil, yet another for the filter, still another from some other guy you never met who briefly looked at the car and discussed fishing with the guy changing the oil, another from the tire inspector (even though you didn't ask for your tires to be inspected). These bills would NOT be presented at the time of service, they would trickle in over the next year or two. Few of them would actually specify what was actually done or why. Somewhere in there you would probably find a charge for adding blinker fluid. The oil would be charged at $1 per cubic millimeter. The people sending the bills (and the only contacts listed on the bills) would be 3rd parties you've never heard of that don't actually know anything about changing oil or even that the bills related to an oil change.
Of course, if any mistakes were made, such as stripping the threads in the oil pan, you would be expected to pay in full for the additional parts and labor needed to correct the error. Nobody would even hint at words like mistake or error, it would be "just something unavoidable that happens sometimes with these complicated procedures".
Of course, that doesn't happen because nobody would stand for it. They'd either change their own oil or get someone they know to do it in their driveway. If that solution was viable (and legal) for medical procedures, that is exactly what would happen. Probably people would die from that going wrong, but they would take the risk in order to avoid medical bankruptcy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @12:22AM (1 child)
My memory is hazy on the details but I seem to recall reading a couple of decades past about some guys who tried to go the DIY route on surgery. I can't remember if it was an attempt at wisdom teeth extraction or tonsils. One guy acted as "surgeon" and the other one was the patient. I do recall that they decided to get a bit liquored up before the "procedure"; the patient as a substitute for "anesthetic" and the surgeon because, well, what the hell. After anesthesia was applied at the local bar, they headed back home to proceed to surgery. The patient lay down on the kitchen table and then the surgeon got to work. I probably don't need to say, but it didn't go too well. I distinctly recall reading that the screams of the patient were blood curdling and could be heard throughout the neighborhood. The patient did not survive. Remember that when you try to go the DIY route on medical treatment.
While bankruptcy is no fun, there are some things that are far worse. See above.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:05AM
And thus my comment that it's not a viable solution and that people would die.
Of course, no "solution" is so bad that someone somewhere (often Florida for some reason) won't try it anyway.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Tuesday August 13 2019, @07:20PM
He didn't try to repeat the laws because he thought they were bad. He doesn't give a shit how effective healthcare was pre or post ACA. He tried to repeal the ACA for no other reason than Obama did it. That's been literally his ONLY tactic for his entire presidency. He's spent orders of magnitude more time dismantling whatever Obama did (when he isn't busy using his position to enrich himself), than actually doing things that help the country.
He doesn't have a plan apart from letting the insurance companies continue to run rampant over the plebes' corpses.
While not everyone benefitted from the ACA, and there were a lot of fuck ups, the ACA did (to my knowledge) help far more people than it harmed. And the ACA is about as good as the US is going to get until you all pull your collective heads out and realize that universal health care is the only option to get things under control.