Two people who have never, ever used Planned Parenthood’s services telling people who need Planned Parenthood’s services that they don’t really need Planned Parenthood’s services.
A couple weeks ago I wrote a post titled “Top Signs Your Healthcare System Is Broken.” Looks like I missed a couple. This Fox News BS is one.
The other was in today’s newspaper, tragically in the obituary section. A 48-year-old chess champion, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia for 20 years, and now another sad case study of a failed healthcare system that won't change because some people are just making too damned much money keeping it broken. His family writes of his suicide:
Our family's sadness is compounded by the lack of effective, vital mental health treatment. The state's TennCare cuts caused Scotty's ineligibility for the Helen Ross McNabb PACT (Program of Assertive Community Treatment) program which successfully kept Scotty, and others, out of the mental hospital for years. Without accessible and affordable Case Management treatment and prevention services, families like ours will continue to suffer tragic outcomes.
These are the death panels that already exist in our broken healthcare system. Everyone keeps telling us American healthcare is the best in all the world, except if you can't access it, it might as well not even exist. I mean how can these idiots not get that? It doesn't matter if our healthcare is the best or second best or even 37th, if your system excludes millions of people it's a failure. End of discussion. And if your politics refuses to recognize that then it, too, is a failure.
I know we just went through hell and back to pass the Affordable Care Act, but could we please stop cutting things like Medicare and Medicaid (and now Planned Parenthood) at every single budget impasse? Please? Because there are real consequences to these cuts. Just ask the family of Scotty Zingheim.
And while we’re cutting funding to women’s health clinics and tossing people off of the public Medicaid system, WellPoint CEO Angela Braly took home $13.4 million last year. Why? What did she do to deserve her bloated salary -- and her Bush tax cut -- while we're balancing our state and federal budgets on the backs of the sick and poor? This is the most immoral, shameful thing I've ever seen. I just can't imagine that it's come to this. Our country would rather give Angela Braly a tax cut than give poor women access to pap smears or get a case manager for a suicidal paranoid schizophrenic.
This is a disgrace.
UPDATE: More on Scotty Zingheim here.
