The Deserving (and Undeserving) Poor

A childhood neighbor and friend posted a doctor's letter to President Obama on Facebook a couple of weeks ago. The doctor told the story of treating an emergency room patient who claimed Medicaid but who had a gold tooth, several tattoos, and was talking on a cell phone during treatment. The thrust of the letter was that this person needed a lesson in personal responsibility which the president might provide. The letter strongly implied that the patient had neglected to buy health insurance in favor of frivolous purchases and now was relying on the taxpayers for medical care.

Of course, we don't know the whole story. She (I'll call the patient female just to give her a personal pronoun.) cannot return the tattoos, and only the most heartless person would suggest she have the gold tooth yanked out to raise money for her doctor's bill. The cell phone might well have been on prepaid minutes and been non-refundable. Telling people in her life that she was in the emergency room doesn't sound frivolous to me.

Perhaps she had just been laid off a job and had lost her health coverage, or been turned down for coverage for some reason. (She was in the emergency room after all.) Perhaps health coverage was simply out of her price range.

I'm not saying this as an excuse if indeed the woman was continually making a choice of luxuries over necessities, and counting on the rest of us to pay for what she requires. What does strike me is the sense of outrage my childhood neighbor and other Facebook "friends" exhibited over the story. Even if the worst interpretation is placed on her actions, this woman took advantage of the system to the tune of a couple of hundred dollars. We're entitled to be angry over any such abuse of our better instincts, but a simple sense of proportion tends to elude us. We should be a million times more outraged over someone who bilks us out of several hundred million dollars as we are over a hospital patient who cheats us of a few hundred dollars. Think Haliburton, just for a start.