Little Town Beseeches Obama’s Health Chief

This is from one of many town meetings across America about health care. It is the first one that former Senator, Tom Daschle, has attended. We have to keep the pressure on for a universal single-payer system. Nothing else makes practical sense.

Mr. Daschle was joined at the meeting, which was held at the town’s firehouse, by several dozen other people. Among them were doctors and administrators from Reid Hospital in nearby Richmond, who told of patients who were flooding the emergency room there because they did not have primary care doctors or insurance coverage.

“Our population hasn’t grown, yet our emergency department census has more than doubled,” Dr. Michael Baldwin, the department’s director, said of changes over the last 24 years. “Everyone used to have his own doctor. Now little more than half do.”

Dr. Joseph Fouts, one of the area’s few general practitioners, said he dealt nearly every day with patients who had found jobs carrying health benefits but who were denied coverage because of what insurers determined to be pre-existing conditions. In a recent case, Dr. Fouts said, a child of one such person was denied coverage for a cold prescription because he had a cold last year.

Full article at: Little Town Beseeches Obama’s Health Chief - NYTimes.com