From The Associated Press:
Frustrated by the U.S. health care system, an Oklahoma doctor being treated for colon cancer decided to write an essay for a medical journal.
But it’s not his own care that upset him. It’s the plight of the uninsured — specifically a patient of his who was the same age, had the same disease, yet couldn’t afford the treatment he got.
Today, Dr. Perry Klaassen, 67, is still working part-time in an Oklahoma City clinic, six years after his diagnosis. Shirley Searcy, his patient, died 18 months after hers.
Klaassen’s treatment included surgery two days after diagnosis and costly new drugs that have kept him going despite cancer that has now spread to his lungs, liver and pelvis.
“I received the most efficient care possible. I was 61 years old and had good group health insurance through my workplace,” he wrote in the essay.
The doctor didn’t name Shirley Searcy in his March 14 article. After all he’d been through, he couldn’t remember her name. But for days he dug through old medical files searching for her identity after he was interviewed by The Associated Press. He realized he could shine a more powerful light on the plight of the uninsured if her story could be told more fully.
And it is a story that’s far from unique. The widowed mother of eight grown children, Searcy had little money. When she began to sense she might be sick, she put off going to the doctor for a year because she knew she couldn’t pay the medical bills. Deeply religious, she put her faith in God, according to her family.
By the time she saw Klaassen, her cancer had spread from her colon to her liver. She had surgery but rejected chemotherapy.
“She just really didn’t feel like she wanted to endure what that would cost physically or financially,” said her daughter-in-law, Karen Searcy.
Shirley Searcy died Dec. 22, 2003, about 18 months after her diagnosis.
While recent attention has focused on high-profile cancer patients like Elizabeth Edwards and Tony Snow, who have the means and insurance to pay for the best treatment, there are tens of thousands of tragic, unseen cancer cases like Searcy’s — people whose lack of insurance stops them from seeking care when they should.
An estimated 112,000 Americans with cancer have no health insurance, according to Physicians for a National Health Program.
And that’s only cancer. Among the 45 million Americans who have no health insurance, there are countless people with chronic and developing health problems who are risking the same kind of fate that took Shirley Searcy’s life.
Klaassen’s essay in the Journal of the American Medical Association illustrates the issue “right there up close and personal,” said editor Dr. Catherine DeAngelis.
It underscores that insurance can be a life or death issue, said Paul Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonpartisan policy research organization. “The cost of health insurance has been going up faster than people’s incomes,” he said.
U.S. spending on health care totaled $2 trillion last year and economists in February projected it will nearly double by 2016.
Said DeAngelis: “We have the richest country in the world and I think the poorest health delivery system in the developed world. It’s really sad.”
Klaassen no longer sees patients but works part-time as medical director of an Oklahoma City group that recruits doctors to give free care to needy patients.
CREATOR GOD, WE JUST WANT to praise you and glorify your holy name -- praise you, praise you, Lord -- for your daughter Shirley Searcy, who gave her life, Lord, to save us from the evil of socialized, communistic medicine . . . from the Satanic plot of national health insurance.
Jesus, we here in Colorado Springs and Washington and Lynchburg and Virginia Beach just want to glorify your holy name right now, and thank you for a Republican administration that saves us from creeping statism and thank you, Lord -- Hallelujah! Hallelujah, Lord! Praise you, Jesus! -- we just want to thank you, Lord, right now, for the meek who forswear their inheritance of the land, Lord, who sacrifice their claim on just wages or worker benefits and insurance, Lord, so your people can gather here today, coming in separate SUVs, Jesus, and listening to Your Holy Word on our individual iPods -- praise you -- all bought at reasonable prices, Lord, because the American working class have heeded your Holy Spirit, Lord, and gotten out of the way of outsourcing and Always Low Prices.
Creator God, we just thank you for this today. We just want to beseech you right now to keep the socialists away from our suburban developments, Lord, and keep our insurance covering our little blue pills, Yahweh, so that we might heed your command to be fruitful and multiply, Lord, just as soon as we've paid off the speedboat, Jesus, and as soon as the market hits the target range, Jesus. Lord, we beseech you that the earnings of our portfolios continue to increase according to thy word, and that you provide our CEOs with a bounty of desperate undocumented Mexicans plenteous as the stars in the sky, Creator God, so that labor overhead might decrease as investor value increases according to Wall Street forecasts, Lord.
Lord God of Israel, save our conservative Republican lawmakers from the abortion-loving and homosexual-kissing liberal demons who threaten our American Way of Life and the Global War on Terror by denouncing torturing those you curse until they give up where the dirty bomb is hidden, Jehovah God, and bring the A-rab hordes to put down their truck bombs and buy our merchandise, which art now made in China.
And we just pray, Lord of Hosts, that if it is thy sovereign will that al Qaida does not give up the dirty bomb location after penile hot wiring and waterboarding, Yahweh, that You will just let it blow up in New Orleans, Lord, so that it will complete thy judgment against the murderous Negroes who have not glorified Your name. Amen.
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