Universal Health Coverage Now
Posted on | February 28, 2007
Until America gets serious about health coverage, guaranteeing it as a right as do other industrialized nations, we are asking for more loss of life, as with twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver, who died of complications from an abcessed tooth:
Eventually, he was rushed to Children’s Hospital, where he underwent emergency brain surgery. He began to have seizures and had a second operation. The problem tooth was extracted.
After more than two weeks of care at Children’s Hospital, the Clinton seventh-grader began undergoing six weeks of additional medical treatment as well as physical and occupational therapy at another hospital. He seemed to be mending slowly, doing math problems and enjoying visits with his brothers and teachers from his school, the Foundation School in Largo.
On Saturday, their last day together, Deamonte refused to eat but otherwise appeared happy, his mother said. They played cards and watched a show on television, lying together in his hospital bed…
The next morning at about 6, she got another call, this time from the boy’s grandmother. Deamonte was unresponsive. She rushed back to the hospital.
“When I got there, my baby was gone,” recounted his mother.
Emergency rooms are not sufficient for medical care. If our so-called “culture of life” ever deigns to notice the invisible children like Deamonte, we will discover a world of suffering that the media, of course, would prefer we ignored.
Fewer than 16 percent of Maryland’s Medicaid children received restorative services — such as filling cavities — in 2005, the most recent year for which figures are available.
Dental coverage could have saved him, long before it became a medical emergency.
