I am sick of reading the Ebola blame casting here on Texas

The folks in Texas fucked up.

Not sure why you would be offended when people call it out.

What if many more get sick in Texas because of Ebola? Why did Perry turn down Medicaid expansion when Texas has the highest uninsured rate in the country? Now they got Ebola.

These are important questions.

the Federal funding for Medicaid expansion would be temporary, and fter it ended, it would be up to the individual states to continue funding a massive program. It would be very expensive.

Also, don't know about Texas, but my niece in Wisconsin is on something called Badgercare, which (I believe) is a supplement to Medicaid. So at least in that state there is a state plan that probably does what a Medicaid expansion would do. Maybe that's true in other states as well.

http://obamacarefacts.com/obamacares-medicaid-expansion.php

Only 10%...the Federal govt would cover the rest.

It's fun to watch people here try and justify the GOP denying Medicaid millions of Americans.

Amusing to say the least....

This is easy to look up. You should do so rather than spout right wing inaccuracies.

How would Medicaid expansion have made a difference?

If 'many more' get sick in Texas, Medicaid expansion is gonna be the least of our worries.

The GOP's failure to expand Medicaid in Texas means that millions of people aren't covered. They don't have to get sick just from Ebola...they could get sick from a number of other things.

They denied coverage to Texans all because they hate Obama.

They're a bunch of dumb fucksticks.

It is amusing to watch you defend them though.

Maybe they would have been able to pay a little more attention to the patient the first time.

ERs tend to be understaffed and swamped with people who should be seen in a doctor's office.

Rather than showing up at your neighborhood doctor's office or Urgent Care. They don't have isolation facilities...which just mean more people will be exposed.

They have colds, flu, urinary tract infections, strep throat, etc. Point is they tie up the ER and over burden the staff. So when a really serious case does show up they wait longer before being seen at all and maybe don't get the attention deserved. It is simple math. Too many people, too few facilities.

Expansion is. People without insurance do not go to the doctor at the first sign of illness. They wait to see if it will go away. And if it does not go away and it turns out to be ebola that many more people will be exposed. It is all about early detection.

For many of us Obamacare, Medicaid Expansion and single payer is not just about having a good system. We have been expecting a pandemic and know that without a system like that we will be as bad off as the countries in Africa that do not have adequate healthcare systems. The leaders of Texas do not seem to understand that.

Obama administration scraps quarantine regulations

The Obama administration has quietly scrapped plans to enact sweeping new federal quarantine regulations that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention touted four years ago as critical to protecting Americans from dangerous diseases spread by travelers.
The regulations, proposed in 2005 during the Bush administration amid fears of avian flu, would have given the federal government additional powers to detain sick airline passengers and those exposed to certain diseases. They also would have expanded requirements for airlines to report ill passengers to the CDC and mandated that airlines collect and maintain contact information for fliers in case they later needed to be traced as part of an investigation into an outbreak.

Airline and civil liberties groups, which had opposed the rules, praised their withdrawal.

The Air Transport Association had decried them as imposing "unprecedented" regulations on airlines at costs they couldn't afford. "We think that the CDC was right to withdraw the proposed rule," association spokeswoman Elizabeth Merida said Thursday.

The American Civil Liberties Union had objected to potential passenger privacy rights violations and the proposal's "provisional quarantine" rule. That rule would have allowed the CDC to detain people involuntarily for three business days if the agency believed they had certain diseases: pandemic flu, infectious tuberculosis, plague, cholera, SARS, smallpox, yellow fever, diphtheria or viral hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-04-01-quarantine_N.htm

The issue was with the idiots at the hospital who sent the sick man home even though he told them that he traveled to Liberia.

He lied to the airlines and they didn't know he was sick.

I would not expect anything different from you.

They were rules that were never in place.

In 2010. Defending that?

And the airlines did not know about the contact with Ebola because he lied on the form. If the CDC rules had been in place he still would have lied on the form and without symptoms the airlines would not have done anything differently.

Ok, got it... We wouldn't want to cost the airlines any money..

Lighten up.

It's kind of like if we were invaded by hostile beings from another planet. Countries would probably stop squabbling amongst themselves, and confront the enemy that is a threat to everyone.

(Hmmmmmmm . . . I think maybe I've watched way too many sci-fi movies.)

with promises of no government intervention...

that is leaving us all (including the 1 percenters who have their heads up their bottom lines) vulnerable to an increasing number of threats.

Rick Perry is the living embodiment of that key tenet of Reaganism.

is the cluster fuck that occurred when the Ebola victim first went to the hospital.

I understand that he did notify them that he had recently arrived from Liberia. Although he was less than truthful about his contact with a dying Ebola victim (the daughter of his landlord) they knew he was from a country with an Ebola outbreak and displaying symptoms that would be present when contagious. THEY SENT HIM HOME.

There can be some discussion about who exactly was responsible for this terrible decision by the hospital to send him home with antibiotics However, pointing out that this was one of the most irresponsible acts imaginable is not demonizing anyone. The people he was in contact before returning to the hospital now have to spend the next three weeks worrying about the possibility they may have contacted a deadly disease.

It is a stretch to politicize this hospital's irresponsible actions, however if we are going to get this thing under control, we must learn by our mistakes. Part of that learning is analyzing the mistakes made in Texas and to avoid them in future cases. I think that is more important than worrying about political agenda's, real or imagined.

than being moved to quarantine in a clean place.

We must learn from these mistakes.

He could have had his face eaten off by a bath salt zombie which would then go around infecting other faceless people.

He could have walked into George Zimmerman's neighborhood.

He could have gone on It's A Small World and infected thousands of kids and their parents forcing them to go on that crappy ride.

An asinine blow-off about Florida on DU.

A state which voted Obama.

Twice.

They are the state with the highest number of uninsured people and how did they react to the ebola crisis yesterday? They quarantined a family in an apartment with infectious materials and closed 13 clinics that do health screenings for women along with abortion services. As icing on the cake, the Texas governor is on his way to Iowa to campaign. I'm sure there are plenty of fine people in Texas, but the loony tunes seem to have the numbers and they're determined to destroy the place.

and use it to persuade politics -- that and plenty of churches.

I don't know who is to blame, but it doesn't seem like anyone with an ounce of common sense is in charge over there. They didn't even think about the waste in the home until Anderson Cooper brought it up. And the image of that guy cleaning up the vomit outside with zero protective gear on? Unreal!

Yeesh.

made me laugh out loud. Still giggling.

I needed that chuckle, because I live in Texas

You gotta remember this one fact:

The #1 Sport on DU is Bashing Texas.

Those of us that do live here and call it Home just have to sigh sometimes at the unmitigated hate coming from supposed "fellow" liberals around here...

We should be bashing Florida.

Go after the idiots in charge, usually republicans. It's so much more satisfying making fun of Gohmert and Christie than entire states.

... and I've always said "as long as there is a Florida, Texas has nothing to be embarrassed about"

This was the first Ebola case, and really, despite the terrible news coming out of West Africa, it is likely that like many people, the people at THP were focused primarily on what types of cases are typical in their ER/D. That's not a Texas condition, but a human condition. Ebola just seemed a world away.

There are superior teaching hospitals in nearly every state where something like this might not have been missed. I suspect that some of the universities in Texas have such institutions. I actually lived in East Texas for a year in the '80s for work, and I seem to recall that U-T and Baylor had fine institutions that might have caught this first case. Maybe.

What is certain is that the level of awareness has increased, and I hope that people are seriously thinking about preparedness and starting to make realistic plans.

From here on out, anyone who has traveled to any part of Africa will receive extra special attention at any ER, urgent care clinic or doctor's office. Unfortunately, it took a fumble by the first hospital to get a walk in Ebola case to do that. And it cold have happened in many, many places.

Buck up little campers!

Are you by any chance from Texas?