Or they’re just very humble and they don’t want to take something they can’t pay for at one night clinic. This story has always really stuck with me. A woman in her forties came in to the night clinic. She’d never been seen in our clinic before because of a complaint that people in the choir wouldn’t stand near her. Hmm. And she had started having an odor that made her unpleasant to be near and she’d avoided healthcare because she couldn’t afford it.
And she was a housekeeper. She had no access to any health insurance and didn’t wanna bankrupt her family. And so on exam that night, she had a breast cancer that was so advanced that had grown through her skin and that’s where the smell was coming from. Wow. And she, she ended up dying a few months later. We could have, if she’d gotten mammograms, you know, like we could have caught this very, very early and treated her and she would’ve gone on to be there for her family. But her fear of bankruptcy for seeking healthcare, or maybe it was, you know, she just didn’t wanna take services from someone else. It’s hard to know what keeps people from walking in the door.
One Rural Doctor on the Cuts to Medicaid
The Daily Podcast transcript