USATODAY.com – Mexicans go to Ariz. for medical help — Americans who need free open heart surgery should be treated as well as Mexicans.
BISBEE, Ariz. — Antonio Valenzuela Gomez, a retired factory worker who boasts 49 grandchildren, lifts his shirt to show the giant scar where American doctors cut into his chest a year ago.
Gomez, 79, was at his house in the dusty Mexican border town of Naco near here when his heart began to fail. There is no hospital in that part of Mexico, so family members loaded Gomez in a car and drove him a short distance to the U.S. checkpoint.
An ambulance arrived from the Arizona side and rushed Gomez 7 miles to Copper Queen Community Hospital here. Emergency room workers stabilized him and sent him 80 miles north to Tucson Medical Center, where heart surgery was performed.
Gomez, who spent three weeks in U.S. hospitals, thinks the bill was about $20,000 — likely a fraction of the actual cost. He offers gratitude along with small monthly payments that will never cover the expense. “They saved my life,” he says. “They treated me well.”
link found by R. Blanchette who adds this comment:
I live near Bisbee. The way things are going, we will have no access to medical care in southern Arizona. All of the small hospitals will be forced to close. The Mexicans complain that they have no clinics nearby. The same is becoming true here, thanks to them. The Reconquista of the Southwest is moving ahead at full speed. In another 10 years Spanish will be the official language. I’m beginning to seriously consider moving elsewhere.
I place the full blame on the voters. They keep reelecting people like John McCain and Jim Kolbe, who have done nothing to combat the problem. I am slowly becoming convinced that the average voter is a complete moron.
I agree completely with R. Blanchette’s comment. I live in Florida and you mind as well sell this state off to Cuba as we are bombarded with the same problems as the southwest States and nothing is done about it. At this point, with the total collapse of good and proper leadership and pathetically apathetic and/or “single issue” constituent base, the capitalistic thing to do would be to treat this country like a failing company and break it up and sell off the parts to the other countries which seem to have a greater self-interest in them… OR we get rid of this “black and white” two party system of government which uses opposite sides of all issues to garner support for control which creates a “reward” system for those groups who choose to manipulate and take advantage of it. As a result, this turns government that is supposed to serve the entire community into a system of self-interest and spoils to the winner (and rewards to all their supporters) even if the winner only won by a 1% margin of victory. Of course, more than two major political parties would be a problem because voters might actually have to pay attention and base their decisions on more than one or two issues and that would be asking for too much involvement.
This is wrong, just plain wrong. And coupled with last week’s forum on the Border Guards standing down really makes me sick.