← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Ed Toner
Thread ID: 5179 | Posts: 8 | Started: 2003-02-23
2003-02-23 19:07 | User Profile
[url=http://www.msnbc.com/news/874197.asp?vts=022220031910]http://www.msnbc.com/news/874197.asp?vts=022220031910[/url] Transplant teen declared dead
quote: "Jesica had a heart deformity that kept her lungs from getting oxygen into her blood. Relatives have said her family paid a smuggler to bring them from their small town near Guadalajara, Mexico, to the United States so she could get medical care."
Fascinating how all those little details tend to get discreetly passed over in the mainstream media, and if actually reported, they try to portray the family's illegal act as some kind of noble act of heroism.
Even though these people were criminals in that they were in violation of federal immigration law, which still exists (for now), they'll still get huge settlements and support from the "Hispanic community" which will validate their claims in the eyes of the average American.
How many decent U.S. citizens needed these organs, and were compatible with them?
2003-02-23 21:46 | User Profile
Originally posted by Ed Toner@Feb 23 2003, 12:07 How many decent U.S. citizens needed these organs, and were compatible with them?
How many Americans died because they didn't get transplants? And how did an illegal get in front of the waiting list? How much did all this cost the taxpayers, and how much it will cost when the settlement is done?
2003-02-23 22:55 | User Profile
Michelle Malkin February 21, 2003
Tough questions about Jessica's transplants
No one can deny that the plight of Jesica Santillan, the sick teenager who mistakenly received organs at Duke University from a donor with a different blood type, is a sad one.
But we cannot ignore the tough public policy questions in Jesica's case that the sob-story writers at The New York Times prefer to paper over:
-- When resources are scarce, as the supply of voluntarily donated organs notoriously are, why shouldn't U.S. citizens get top priority?
-- According to national figures, 16 patients die in the U.S. each day while waiting for a potentially life-saving transplant operation. How many American patients currently on the national organ waiting list were denied access to healthy hearts and lungs as a result of Santillan's two transplant surgeries? Who will tell their stories?
-- Finally, if Jesica recovers from the second heart-lung transplant, will any federal immigration authority have the guts to enforce the law and send her and her family back home to Mexico?
According to Times reporter Denise Grady, "Ms. Santillan's family moved from Mexico to North Carolina three years ago in hopes that she could be treated at Duke for restrictive cardiomyopathy, which caused an enlarged, weakened heart and damaged lungs."
But as other media outlets have more accurately and honestly detailed, Santillan's family didn't just "move" here. They came here illegally by paying a coyote $5,000 to smuggle Santillan and her mother across the border for the express purpose of obtaining medical care and circumventing long wait times in Mexico.
A North Carolina businessman, Mack Mahoney, founded a private charity to raise funds for Santillan's transplants. But the charity cannot replace the organs that were used in Santillan's surgeries. Those hearts and lungs are not fungible.
In all likelihood, taxpayers will be on the hook for Santillan's post-operative care one way or another. Transplant patients must take immunosuppressant medications for the life of the transplanted organs, for example. Typical costs of post-transplant drugs may be as much as $2,500 per month in the first year alone. And as we all know, Santillan's botched operation was far from typical. Her illegal immigrant parents will probably sue Duke University, adding further to this case's surgery-related costs.
The United Network for Organ Sharing, the non-profit group that coordinates the nation's transplant system, has established a policy that no more than 5 percent of the organs transplanted at any hospital are allowed to go to illegal immigrants or foreign nationals. But when medical facilities have tried to deny organ transplants to illegal aliens, they have been met with a political and media uproar. Last summer, for example, the Cleveland Clinic was pressured by a local Hispanic city councilman into admitting an illegal immigrant from Guatemala for a liver transplant after initially turning her away.
The costs of illegal alien health care are crippling hospitals across the country. In North Carolina, where Santillan's family has settled, a Medicaid emergency services program averages 221 new cases every month involving immigrants, many of them illegal, at a cost of about $32 million. As The Washington Times reported recently, dozens of hospitals in the 28 counties along the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California have either closed their doors or face bankruptcy because of losses caused by uncompensated care given to illegal immigrants.
Scripps Memorial Hospital in San Diego was forced to close after losing more than $5 million a year in unreimbursed medical care, much of it for illegal immigrants, Times reporter Jerry Seper noted. The Southeast Medical Center in Douglas, Ariz., is on the verge of bankruptcy because of uncompensated care to undocumented aliens; the Cochise County, Ariz., Health Department spends as much as 30 percent of its annual $9 million budget on undocumented aliens; and the University Medical Center in Tucson will spend up to $10 million this year providing uncompensated alien health care.
New York medical providers have performed dozens of organ-transplant operations -- and even sex-change operations -- to illegal aliens. The costs of such "charity" care typically are shifted to insured patients, resulting in higher health insurance premiums.
In a world of scarce resources, compassion must have limits. We cannot afford to be a medical welcome mat to the world.
2003-02-23 23:49 | User Profile
The heart was the wrong size for one, and the other was not medically ready for a transplant. Jesicaââ¬â¢s doctor then asked about giving the heart and lungs to Jesica. Although she was not listed on the match run, the transplant coordinator said OK.**
IS MANIPULATION POSSIBLE?
Neither the coordinator nor the doctor realized that she was not the right blood type ââ¬â the reason she was not on the computerââ¬â¢s list of possible patients.
Officials involved in this case have not said whether there were other patients on the match run who might have received the organs.**
So, who are we to assume was responsible for this criminal negligence? And how will the public be protected from these incompetent manipulators in the future?
2003-02-24 01:36 | User Profile
That illegal was the responsibility of the Republic of Mexico and the hospital should send Fox the bill. The real murders will happen to those people who were pushed back on the list and will have die because of this PC incompentance. If the media was pushing this story to make me feel more sorry for the plight of the illegals, it didn't work, but instead made me even colder about my stance on illegals. I read somewhere that this girl's parents are planning to sue the hospital. That is illegal gratitude for you!
2003-02-24 03:23 | User Profile
Did you hear the testimony of Doctor Jaggars?? Instead of handling the situation like a man should, he resorts to the p*ssy stance. I can see him turning in his medical license next. Idiot.
2003-02-24 18:57 | User Profile
Apart from Original Dissenters you can just about forget America, stick a fork in it, it's done.
2003-02-25 02:25 | User Profile
From an email sent to me.
skemper
ezine@projectusa.org Sent from the Internet (Details)
Mexican girl's death reveals larger tragedy Issue 145-9r: Feb 24, 2003
+== TIME-OUT PROJECT ==+
The hearts of millions of Americans go out to the family of Jesica Santillan, the 17-year-old Mexican girl who died Saturday after a bungled heart-lung transplant at Duke University Hospital in North Carolina. In spite of the girl's -- and her family's -- status as illegal aliens, most Americans understand the simple sadness of the human loss involved, and can sympathize with Jesica's parents' willingness to break U.S. immigration law in a desperate attempt to get life-saving treatment for their daughter.
However, tragic as this young woman's particular story is, her death sheds light on a larger, more generalized tragedy.
In 2002, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, 5,542 persons in the United States died waiting for an organ transplant. Each of their deaths, to their loved ones, is as sad as Jesica Santillan's death is to her family (which has already announced plans to sue the hospital).
Duke University Hospital, where Jesica died, claims on its website to be "consistently one of the largest recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)." Indeed, through the NIH, and through other Federal programs like Medicaid, American taxpayers largely subsidize the hospital's roughly one billion dollar yearly budget.
Some of those American taxpayers and their children died last year waiting for transplants that never came, and this year, at least one more American taxpayer will die waiting for the transplant that Duke University Hospital chose to give to a citizen of a foreign nation.
Extrapolating from the data at the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, there are 1.7 million persons in the world in need of an organ transplant. Clearly, the U.S. health care system cannot accommodate them all.
The greater tragedy in the Jesica Santillan story is a system that rewards illegal aliens for entering the United States to access our health care system, thus condemning some of the American taxpayers who pay for that system to premature deaths. Few could deny the sheer unfairness of such a situation.
To the undiscerning or uninformed, treating sick foreigners is "compassionate," but there is yet another side to this tragedy: Every year, hundreds of foreign nationals die attempting to cross our dangerous southern border illegally. Almost all of them are tempted to try the dangerous crossing by the perceived rewards, or "magnets," for illegal aliens on this side of the border. These magnets include employment, free education, birthright citizenship for babies, promises of eventual amnesties, and, of course, superior and free health care.
How many of those who die in our southern deserts every year are lured to their gruesome deaths by irresponsible U.S. immigration policies and the "compassion" lobby?