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Why Health Care Should Be a Human Right

by Kristy Dale
In the article "My 22-Year Old Daughter Died Because She Told ER She Didn’t Have Health Insurance" by Tana Ganeva from Truth Out explains that a woman named Shalynne was not treated by the hospital because she did not have healthcare. Shalynne, at the age of twenty two, ended up dying because she did not receive the care or treatment she needed for the pain she was feeling in her knee.
In the United States, not everyone has access to health care/insurance. Whether it be Aetna or Obama Care and either HMO or PMO. Not everyone has equal opportunity to receive it. Some people get it through their work, while others have to apply for Medicaid since they aren’t offered these same benefits. Medicaid isn’t easily available to those that apply and it can take a while to be accepted, even after the passing of the Affordable Care Act. Truth Out, an independent news source, came out with an article by Tana Ganeva called “My 22-Year Old Daughter Died Because She Told ER She Didn’t Have Health Insurance”. This article is about a twenty-two-year-old woman named Shalynne who was taken to the emergency room and wasn’t taken care of because she didn’t have health insurance. In 2014 Shalynne tore her ACL, and months after she took a twenty-two-hour trip that advanced her knee pain. Her boyfriend then took her to Centennial Hills Hospital Medical Center and they asked if she had health insurance, and her response was that she did not. She continuously brought up how much pain she was feeling at the time and no one seemed to do anything to assist her. Ganeva states that Shalynne’s family mentioned “…once hospital staff were told Shalynne didn't have insurance, they treated her dismissively -- failing to provide adequate emergency care or screening procedures, neglecting to get her medical history, and not giving her meds for what she described as "eight-out-of-10" pain” (Ganeva 1), this is absolutely ridiculous. To have a patient in severe pain and disregarded on purpose is disgusting and immoral.

Likewise, our healthcare system is only concerned about how much money they are making rather than caring for its own people’s health. I believe health care is a human right. What do health care/insurance companies have to lose? These companies, for example Aetna – a billion-dollar company is not assisting the needs of its patients because of the fear of making a little less money a year. Ganeva then discusses how it is illegal to discriminate against someone who doesn’t have health care. How could you treat someone so disrespectfully because of the lack of resources the United States isn’t providing for its citizens? She then states that Shalynne’s mother, Amy, stated “…the hospital staff thought she was Hispanic; they marked her ethnicity as Hispanic, although Shalynne was actually half black and half white, while her boyfriend, who had brought her to the hospital, was black” (Ganeva 1), so not only is the United States health care system not providing for its people because they don’t have health care, but they are also discriminating its patients by their race. This is very problematic and unethical, to think our country is doing this is very disturbing and we need to find a way to fix this reoccurring issue and provide health care to all people.
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