The charges started racking up the moment Annette Johnson arrived at Mount Sinai Hospital with a gunshot wound to her left forearm.
Doctors sliced open Johnson’s arm and installed a $500 metal plate to shore up her shattered ulna, securing it with numerous bone screws that cost $246 apiece. There were morphine drips to quell pain, tetanus shots to prevent infection, blood screens and anesthesia.
Two years earlier in a different part of the city, Leo Leyva arrived at a North Side hospital with a gunshot wound to his back. His last memory before going under anesthesia was a nurse telling him they were going to take good care of him and to count up to 10.
As the 18-year-old drifted off, the emergency room team at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center went to work to save his life, starting IV lines and X-raying his chest and abdomen before performing an emergency surgery to remove the bullet and repair the damage.
For both Johnson and Leyva, just two of the thousands of gunshot victims in Chicago every year, the first hours and days of their hospital treatment were only the start of what would be costly recoveries that continue to this day.
Still, the bills for their initial treatment were staggering. In his first 35 minutes at the hospital, Leyva had racked up $21,521 in charges, and by the time he was released three weeks later the bill totaled more than $157,000. For Johnson, who spent barely 24 hours at Mount Sinai, the hospital charges approached $27,000.
So the nation has gone bankrupt. Pensions are gone. Social security, Medicare, EBT, and welfare are history. Everybody is out of work. Food can not be found because it will be hijacked before it can be delivered. And every day when people head off to work, they have to run a gauntlet of savages and animals looking to attack them and take their shit.
That means every day the number of bullet wounds delivered to the ER then will probably make Chicago now on a sweltering Saturday night seem like a Mormon kindergarten class naptime. And by then Obamacare is gone, and everyone is broke.
You can see how the stresses of such a time will change how easy-going and happy-go-lucky everyone will be.
If a migrant has any chance of bringing violence to our land, people will immediately feel the aversive stimulus associated with things like this. Suddenly what leftists now think is being too uptight and unfair to migrants will become just the normal way you view the situation.
Big changes are coming, both in the environment, and in our psychologies.
I’m not at all surprised by this in the least. Our society is incredibly over burdened by the weight of rabbit-ry our predecessors allowed to develop and their successors continued to nurture. The machine will find ways to extract value from all us, one way or another, in the futile attempt to sustain itself without sacrifice or discipline right up until the moment it collapses underneath its own weight.
Those of us who can and see it coming, are hopefully learning what we can and developing what we can in preparation for that potentially horrific day. Until then, everyone else’s bills must go up in a desperate attempt to balance the books because it would be unseemly, immoral, and unethical to just let willfully useless people die.
It all makes me think of the Air Force One and Area 51 scenes from the first Independence Day movie.
They don’t really need to charge that much for medical treatment – they are doing that because they can.