Remember during the Presidential campaign Mitt Romney (and other GOP candidates) refuted the claim that Americans do not have unequal opportunities for health care - the Emergency Room is there for anyone to get their healthcare.
"Well, we do provide care for people who don't have insurance," Romney told interviewer Scott Pelley. "If someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and -- and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care."
As an apartment dweller, this quote always got under my skin, the way he singled out apartment dwellers as the people who would need to call ambulances for health care, his little dogwhistle there.
After his dismal failure at the polls last November you'd think Romney would be hiding in one of his car elevators, but no, he has come out swinging, criticizing President Obama for 'lying' that you could keep your healthcare if you liked it (as if something like that would ever affect Romney) and more recently blasting the President for being an insurance dictator.
"It's not just that the president tells people that they have to buy health insurance, it's that he tells them what health insurance they have to buy," Romney said. "The idea that the government knows better than the American people what kind of insurance they have to have makes no sense. That is something which I think the American people are rejecting in large numbers
And since Romney can't let go, here is the perfect example to remind him how wrong he and his party were on healthcare.
A Bronx man who went to Saint Barnabas Hospital to get his rash checked out was found dead in the emergency room waiting room after an eight hour wait. John Verrier, 30, went to St. Barnabas at 10 p.m. last Sunday night; he was found dead by a security guard around 6:40 a.m. the next day. "He was found stiff, blue and cold," a hospital employee told ABC News. "He died because [there's] not enough staff to take care of the number of patients we see each day. We need more staff at Saint Barnabas."
Verrier had his vitals taken when he first got to the hospital, then told to wait for a doctor to see him. Hospital spokesman Steve Clark told the Post that Verrier's name was called "two or three times" between his arrival and 2 a.m. A security guard passed through the waiting room around 2 a.m. to wake up the many homeless people who sleep there, and Verrier was "moving, he was alive." Then when the security guard passed again around 6 a.m., he was dead.
Clark added that an in-house review found “all guidelines were met.” But the hospital worker who spoke to ABC said nobody was really checking on him: "There's no policy in place to check the waiting room to see if people waiting to be seen are still there or still alive." That worker says Verrier's name was called over the PA three times, but "based on number of people in the waiting room it is impossible to check on each person physically."
Not that Romney would possibly care about the fate of this poor man who died from nothing more serious than an apparent rash - but let's not let that stop us from telling him he's wrong. "Obamacare" has not kicked in for everyone yet, perhaps this young man could have gone to see a doctor before his problem became life-threatening if he had had the good luck to wait another month or so. Even if he does live in an apartment.