When my cousin, a medical professional, shared this on Facebook, I assumed it was just an email forward telling a fictional story. It’s not.
Dr. Roger Starner Jones is an ER Doctor who works at UMMC and is currently selling this condo, featuring a central vacuum. Real guy. What he wrote below was published August 29th, 2009 and is currently making rounds on Facebook in a slightly modified version addressed to the President.
If he is correct, then the health care overhaul just made worse the problem that has caused the mess we’re currently in with health care. What do you think?
Dear Sirs:
During my last night’s shift in the ER, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient with a shiny new gold tooth, multiple elaborate tattoos, a very expensive brand of tennis shoes and a new cellular telephone equipped with her favorite R&B; tune for a ring tone.
Glancing over the chart, one could not help noticing her payer status: Medicaid.
She smokes more than one costly pack of cigarettes every day and, somehow, still has money to buy beer. And our President expects me to pay for this woman’s health care?
Our nation’s health care crisis is not a shortage of quality hospitals, doctors or nurses. It is a crisis of culture – a culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on vices while refusing to take care of one’s self or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance.
A culture that thinks I can do whatever I want to because someone else will always take care of me.
Life is really not that hard. Most of us reap what we sow.
Starner Jones, MD
Jackson, MS
As a side note, I’m not the only one trying to find the source of this letter. The news paper that published this doesn’t have it archived on their website, but people are looking. 5 of the top 10 searches today are trying to find this story:
