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Firebird Film Festival 2018 - Justice

The mission of the Firebird Film Festival is to be innovative educationally and to encourage social, cultural, economic and political awareness among the UDC student body and D.C. community.

Healthcare Can’t Wait- Healthcare Access In America

Healthcare Can’t Wait- Healthcare Access In America

Thursday, November 1st

 

Time : Doors open @5:00 PM Film – Starts @5:30 PM

Location: UDC Student Center

 

The Waiting Room

Filmmaker Peter Nicks chronicles events at a public hospital’s emergency room, where the overworked staff and many uninsured patients must cope with disease, injury, bureaucracy and hard choices.

Summary

The Uninsured

The system of private and public health insurance leaves many Americans without adequate health insurance. The current estimate is that close to 40 million people may lack health insurance altogether at any one time (Kronick and Gilmer, 2002). Many of these are children. Some uninsured persons, such as those who are young and healthy, evidently choose to remain uninsured rather than pay premiums for coverage that they do not expect to need. Many others do not receive health care benefits from their employers and cannot afford to purchase individual insurance.

Uninsured persons may still receive some health care. ‘Free clinics’, funded largely by charitable contributions, operate in many cities. Moreover, an uninsured person may go to a hospital emergency room, where they usually will receive some basic and emergency services. But hospitals increasingly are unable to absorb the costs of caring for these patients, which they traditionally managed by shifting the costs onto other patients who had insurance, a practice that is becoming more difficult as health insurers pay less in their attempts to control their costs. Some hospitals have refused to care for indigent, uninsured patients, even in emergencies; this prompted Congress to enact a law requiring hospitals to at least ‘stabilize’ patients before they can be turned out (US Congress, 2002b)

 

Mehlman, M. J. (2003). Health care and health insurance in the United States. In D. N. Cooper, Encyclopedia of the human genome. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley

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