From the Palm Beach Post:
The CDC officer had a serious warning for Florida health officials in April: A tuberculosis outbreak in Jacksonville was one of the worst his group had investigated in 20 years. Linked to 13 deaths and 99 illnesses, including six children, it would require concerted action to stop.
That report had been penned on April 5, exactly nine days after Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed the bill that shrank the Department of Health and required the closure of the A.G. Holley State Hospital in Lantana, where tough tuberculosis cases have been treated for more than 60 years…
Had they seen the letter, decision makers would have learned that 3,000 people in the past two years may have had close contact with contagious people at Jacksonville’s homeless shelters, an outpatient mental health clinic and area jails. Yet only 253 people had been found and evaluated for TB infection, meaning Florida’s outbreak was, and is, far from contained.
The kicker in this story, the point that reveals the sheer stupidity of the Right Wing “let-them-eat-cake” attitude towards healthcare and the poor, is the following:
…only two-thirds of the active cases could be traced to people and places in Jacksonville where the homeless and mentally ill had congregated. That suggested the TB strain had spread beyond the city’s underclass and into the general population.
See, that’s the thing about contagion. It doesn’t care that you live in an affluent neighborhood, or that your kids go to a good private school. It doesn’t care that you haven’t actually been designated a member of the “underclass” who doesn’t really count.
When you allow certain serious illnesses like TB to go untreated among the poor, they are going to spread, and you can’t count on them stopping at the handsome border hedge of your gated community.
And at the other end of the spectrum:
From the Los Angeles Times, on the donors lining up to attend a Hampton fundraiser for Mitt Romney:
A New York City donor a few cars back, who also would not give her name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. ‘I don’t think the common person is getting it,’ she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. ‘Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.
‘We’ve got the message,’ she added. ‘But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.’
I’d love to have a transcript of the conversations with her “nail lady” and baby sitter that have led her to this conclusion. The memory of them plainly still rankles. She seems to be one of those people who says “they just don’t understand what’s been going on” when it would be more accurate to say “they just aren’t convinced by my lame-o arguments.”
And of course, their disagreement couldn’t possibly be related to their own down and dirty experiences in a bad economy. It has to be because “common people” just aren’t as educated and wise as her own, uncommon, modest little self.
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