Teabaggery and Ebola

The first man to die of Ebola in the U.S., Thomas Duncan, was an African man with no health insurance. He was initially discharged by the hospital with an antibiotic prescription even though he had a fever of 103 degrees. The hospital knew that Duncan had just arrived from Africa, which should have been an alarm. Even so, someone with that much fever is very sick, and there was no diagnosis. He was just given antibiotics and sent home.  And one does wonder if a white man, or a person of any color with insurance, would have been at least kept for observation.

Even after Duncan had been diagnosed with Ebola Texas couldn’t get its act together.

It’s clear now that not just the hospital but state and local authorities responded inadequately to Duncan’s illness. His family and friends were quarantined, but left to fend for themselves; county public health officials didn’t even provide clean bedding. “The individuals, it’s up to them … to care for the household,” Erikka Neroes of Dallas County health and human services told the Guardian a week after Duncan had been admitted to the hospital. “Dallas County has not been involved in a disinfection process.”

When the disinfection process began, belatedly, there’s evidence that was botched as well. The Guardian found a team of contractors with no protective clothing simply power-washing the front porch, for instance, when it should have been scrubbed with bleach. A baby stroller sat nearby.

While the increasingly weird Grandpa John called for an Ebola czar, other people pointed to cuts in public health spending at the state and federal level that left us vulnerable. See Sarah Kliff, “The Stunning Cuts to America’s Budget to Fight Disease Outbreaks.” And then let’s go back to this:

The GOP approach to public health was crystallized at the 2012 debate where Rep. Ron Paul – another Texas politician — said it wasn’t the government’s responsibility to take care of a hypothetical young man who showed up in the emergency room very sick after he decided not to buy insurance. “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks,” Paul said, deriding “this whole idea that you have to prepare to take care of everybody …”

“Are you saying that society should just let him die?” moderator Wolf Blitzer asked. And the crowd roared “Yeah!” (For his part Paul answered no, but said hospitals should treat such cases as charity and not be compelled to do so.) Lest you think either Paul or that Florida audience represented a minority sentiment in the GOP, recall that none of his rivals, not even Mitt Romneycare, challenged Paul’s approach at the debate.

But now we know what happens when hospitals fail to adequately care for uninsured people who turn up in the ER: They can die, which is awful, but they may also spread disease and death to many other people. It’s pragmatism, not socialism, that commits governments to a public health agenda.

Republicans don’t do pragmatic. Republicans do tax cuts and then blame Democrats when the tax cuts have consequences.

15 thoughts on “Teabaggery and Ebola

  1. “Are you saying that society should just let him die?” moderator Wolf Blitzer asked. And the crowd roared “Yeah!”

    If only we could stop all these brown folks from coming into and over the border, then everything would be great!

  2. As I have said before–The Republican Health Plan-!. Don’t get sick. 2. If you do, please die quickly. And now, 3. Keep your disease to yourself. It’s not our job to look after people.
    Words don’t fail me anymore, but those are not proper to say in public. Reckon what they are going to say when people with money are starting to get sick??

  3. It was 12 years ago I traveled to Russia, and part of the process of getting a visa was obtaining proof of medical insurance. Their system of medicine does take care of anyone and they don’t want to be burdened with the cost of sick foreigners- and that’s not irrational or excessive.

    A libertarian might even endorse the policy of requiring people to take responsibility. But extend it rationally to a domestic policy and it requires everyone to have insurance.

  4. I’d say, “unbelievable,” but, knowing this nation of “MORANS!!, it’s all too believable…

  5. This is where I start to wonder how blindingly obvious something has to be before people catch on. Any Republican who’s running around screaming about Ebola right now, you have to ask how they would handle it differently than Obama and the Democrats. And the answer of course is that they would eliminate the CDC altogether and let the Market protect us from mutant infections. Because they don’t think the government should be involved in health care.

  6. If Jerry Brown was shameless enough, he could use this in his campaign. He kept us safe from Ebola!

  7. Steven Soderbergh’s movie Contagion predicted exactly this, a deadly viral outbreak in Tea Party America. The best way to survive: be a member of Matt Damon’s gene pool. (Yeah, I wish.)

    We’re really going to have to hold politicians to account in order to avoid the dismal scenario of the film. First time for everything?

  8. Steven Soderbergh’s movie Contagion was perhaps the most boring, snooze inducing movie I have ever had the misfortune of paying good money for. Really awful.

  9. In what I have recently read about the nurse who may have ebola, it sounds like sexism has raised its ugly head. The nurses were never required to go through the extremes in covering up as the doctors. Any one who has stayed in a hospital even a short time knows that nurses spend 90 percent more time with the patients than the doctors. Why were they not allowed to dress the same as the doctors? Most likely because the nurses (who are primarily of the female persuasion) are considered less important in the health care hierarchy.

  10. At the ER at Duke University Hospital yesterday, I noted that asking about travel to/from Africa was one of the first intake questions. But there was no “Have you been in the presence of anyone who has recently been in Africa within the last 30 days?” which would seem to me to be worth the extra 10 seconds. Especially considering the blanket-wrapped lady in a retching in a corner. Maybe we could duct-tape Issa to her and let him do a real-time investigation of the Eblola threat.

  11. Bonnie: My experience as a nurse was just the opposite of what you are describing. Of course, I never encountered anything like Ebola but MRSA was common. All the nurses were very conscientious about observing the protocol while doctors were more complacent. They would enter a patient’s room without gowning up or without wearing gloves. Not all doctors, of course, but it only takes one. My guess is that at the hospital in Texas, the protocol was not clear or they didn’t have one cause they weren’t expecting Ebola.

    Nurses were sufficiently supervised and reprimanded while doctors were allowed to do what they wanted. Is that sexiem or doctorism?

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