Long, OT, and something for the conservatives

This is posted to the three groups I normally subscribe to, and
decidedly off topic in any of them. However:

My daughter just came home, a week ago from a two month stay in the
hospital. She now has a tracheostomy, and has, in her room, an oxygen
concentrator and nebulizer that she is hooked to, 24 hours a day.
Needless to say, with her birth defects, there is no insurance company
that will touch her, and Medicaid is all she has. She has had a
urostomy for nearly twenty years, the cost of her supplies, the
adhesive wafers to hold the bag and the bags themselves, one box of
each costs $134. That is, six bags and six wafers, no guarantee, they
might last a week, or an hour. Sorry, they're not guaranteed to work.

Medicaid pays a whopping $5, except that the local druggist won't
accept that, even if my daughter pays the rest. He is, of course, a
businessman first, a human second from last, and as he refuses to pay
support for his twin children, a family man last. Above all, he is a
Bush supporter, he's comfortable and has no cares for anyone else,
family or not, except for daddy, who's a lawyer.

It gets worse. Through the years, the help that she has been getting
from various agencies, with toxic tommy as our grovelmore, has
declined to almost nil. They will pay to have her ostomies checked,
ONLY if she is in a nursing home. If someone can explain why it's
possible in a $1000 dollar a day institution, but not possible for
someone to come here once a week for $115, and make any sense, I'd be
very interested in hearing it.

Assistance for me, meaning training on taking care of the
tracheostomy, was exactly zero, nada, none, yet I'm the one that has
to do it, and my daughter is the teacher. Changing the sponges around
it has to be done daily, and suctioning her lungs sometimes has to be
done three times a day, sometimes none. Still, these are supposed to
be sterile proceedures.

Help for me around the house, there is nothing available, and the few
nurses that I've talked to, friends and my sister, tell me that my
limit of ONE HOUR of leaving her alone is stretching it. Yes, it
would be possible to leave her longer, IF I could find someone trained
to do what might have to be done. But, of course, I would have to pay
that person. Out of my social security check. At $115 per hour.

There is no county nurse, that was privatized, and the pansy they sent
out declined to accept her, she has two cats, using them as a reason.
Or an excuse which is more accurate. My daughter and the two cats are
the only ones in her room most of the time. Their other reason, I
smoke. I don't smoke in her room, but, it's still my house and nobody
is going to tell me to go outside in the winter to smoke. Their
reasoning, "fire hazard with the oxygen." Never mind that I have a
gas furnace, gas water heater, gas clothes drier, gas range. Those
are ok, I guess?

Sitting on my front porch are two tanks of LOX, and nobody has shown
me how to use them to refill the portable units. As the portable
units are empty, and I'm not about to go messing with LOX without
someone showing me how, in the last week they have gone from 100% down
to 80%, and we have drawn nothing from them. Medicaid picks up the
cost on that, and it's taxpayer money that is slowly evaporating, with
nobody getting any benefit except the supplier.

When the outer cannula of her trach needs changing, I have no idea of
where to go for that, nobody has any answers there.

Contrast this to the situation when she was born, the county nurse
visiting every three weeks, and if anything was needing attention,
they also took care of it immediately. In 35 years, I have seen our
health care system totally privatized, *******ized, and commercialized
to the point that public health systems are now helpless and useless.
The county nurse disappeared under the reign of ruin of raygun, and I
believe was a deliberate attempt, not an accidental effect. The
fifteen minute visits from the county nurse were of far more value and
far less cost than what exists today, which is nothing. There is no
help for people that are not bad enough to need a nursing home, and I
believe because it doesn't funnel money into the huge and greedy
corporations as a nursing home would. The corporations that now have
what used to be public health jobs are interested only in the money,
they couldn't care less about what happens to people that need only a
little help, there's more money in the mark if they're in a home.

What used to be my linen closet is now storage for medical supplies,
only a very few of which I have any idea of what they're for. The
rest are, as far as I'm concerned, unknowns, meaning waste that the
taxpayer paid for. Merely another corporation raking in the medical
buck and not having to account for what they left. I don't think
we're talking hundreds of dollars, I think it's thousands of dollars.
I have no idea what a medical nasal cannula costs, but I know there
are more than twenty of them, and she breathes through the hole in her
throat. I'm also willing to bet that they aren't in the $5 range,
more like $25.

However, if, by the end of next week the corporation that supplies the
LOX hasn't sent someone out to show me how to use the units, they're
going to be told to take them back, there's no sense in having
something evaporate when it boils down to dollars being totally
wasted. I'm also going to sort through the junk in the linen closet
and if I don't know what it is, it means we don't need it, it's going
back, but I'm also going to furnish human services with a list of what
goes back so they can stop payment for any of it. None of this stuff
is cheap, and nobody has a right to say I have to accept it even at
taxpayer expense. Especially when it's only waste to the taxpayer and
profit to the supplier.