Changing Health Care System

Thank you for your recent two-part series on "Treating the Uninsured."

Almost every day I have an e-mail or phone call from someone who has lupus but does not have insurance. Often people with lupus cannot work, so they lose their insurance --health club if they had any insurance to begin with. What money they have is used for medical bills.

Getting approval for Social Security disability payments involves a lengthy process --Health Sexual generally taking two years or more. Bankruptcy can occur before approval is secured. Patients with Medicaid are often surprised to find that rheumatologists and other specialists rarely accept Medicaid (because Medicaid often fails to reimburse the doctors).

Free and low-cost clinics do not feel competent to handle difficult diseases such as lupus. To my knowledge, only one clinic in Orange County treats the uninsured lupus patient and it operates only one day a month.

These patients are good, taxpaying people who suffer terribly in one of the richest countries in the world, but they can be treated as throwaways by our system. Recently PBS (WMFE ) aired Frontline: Sick Around the World, which reviewed the health-care systems of other developed countries and showed that it is possible to cover all citizens at a reasonable cost.

Health care in the U.S. has just got to change if we are to consider ourselves a compassionate people.