Cost of medicine

This is obviously a very hot topic lately, so I want to post an article I came across that caught my eye: "Burned Baby's Parents Charged, Mother: Didn't Want to Pay for Ambulance"

As is often the case in these situations, many things went wrong. An infant was left unattended in a sink, a toddler was left unattended, the extent of wounds was underestimated and balanced against the estimated cost.

A couple thoughts. It doesn't matter what your opinion is about whether or not people have a right to health care (and from what I read on message boards, many people do not believe there is a right to health care), when the lack of affordable health care leads to serious injury and potential death, you have a social program that destroys its citizens. The issue isn't that these parents made a mistake, but rather their thought process. They love their child, but can't afford the cost of an ambulance and couldn't get a ride to the hospital. The wounds didn't look serious, so when they could get there they didn't go, because they couldn't afford the cost of care. Now society wants to charge them for not giving the child care they couldn't afford.

I think it's a very difficult question. It seems not unlike debtor's jail - if you can't afford your child's medical treatment, you are a criminal. Yes, a child is a human life and as a result, anything done to hurt the child is an attack against a human. And my response here would be that by deciding to have a child, these people took on that responsibility until the child is at an age of majority.

The only problem is, you don't end up with a child the way you end up with a pair of shoes you don't need. Particularly when you're poor and grow up in circumstances that put different values on family and motherhood and validate a sense of identity for a girl growing up in what are highly unusual circumstances to the people in the judiciary/jury who would pass judgment on this case when she becomes a mother. She finally becomes someone. Moreover, children have a tendency to pop out, often regardless of whether precautions are taken.

Point merely being that, as with many of these situations, the issue is extremely complicated and is far from being a simple case of abuse. It actually doesn't sound like abuse at all to me. And furthermore, I think we undermine the importance of going after abuse when we call what are rational actions in certain people's minds, as a result of their circumstances, abuse. We owe the people who end up in these circumstances far more than to call them criminals and post their photos on the web. They need to be treated like human beings. They needed that a long time ago. And instead of doing anything about it, we chastise them years later when their actions are inconsistent with what we think is appropriate. Where were we when they needed to learn how to deal with these situations? What solutions are we providing?