Paying The Healthcare Bills Of Those Who Abuse The System

On August 23, 2009, the Jackson, Mississippi Clarion Ledger published a letter to the editor a letter from Dr. Roger Starner Jones, an emergency room physician at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Dr. Jones letter was published under the title, "Why Pay for the Care of the Careless?" It reads as follows:

Why Pay for the Care of the Careless? 

During my last shift in the ER, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient with a shiny new gold tooth, multiple elaborate tattoos and a new cellular telephone equipped with her favorite R&B tune for a ringtone. 

Glancing over the chart, one could not help noticing her payer status: Medicaid.

Dr. Roger Starner Jones

She smokes a costly pack of cigarettes every day and, somehow, still has money to buy beer. 

.

And our president expects me to pay for this woman's health care?

Our nation's health care crisis is not a shortage of quality hospitals, doctors or nurses. It is a crisis of culture - culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on vices while refusing to take care of one's self or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance. 

Life is really not that hard. Most of us reap what we sow.
Starner Jones, MD
Jackson, MS

Apparently there were some public critics who took exception to Dr. Jones views saying he drew his took  conclusions on a single incident. He defended his original statements in a follow-up letter to the same newspaper five months later:

America is Still the Land of Opportunity-For Everyone 

Starner Jones, M.D.

Jackson, MS
January 11, 2010 

I continue to receive numerous phone calls, letters, emails and face-to-face comments about my letter ("Why Pay For the Care of the Careless") which appeared in your newspaper a few months ago. 

Most people express highest approval for the opinion set forth. Indeed, the truth has an illuminating quality all its own. 

However, a few have disagreed and all of them falsely assume that a person who holds the views which I espouse must have been raised in a privileged home. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

I grew up in a lower middle class, single parent home in the rural hill country of Pontotoc, Mississippi. While attending public schools, I paid attention in class and did my homework. I ran with the right crowd and stayed out of trouble. My dedication in school resulted in a full-paid scholarship to the prestigious University of the South in Sewanee, TN. After college, I left to go to medical school with everything I owned in three bags. The rest is history. 

Motivation, not entitlement, is the key to personal success and happiness in life.

Dr. Jones may or may not have drawn his conclusions based on one incident, but how many of us have been privy to something similar...such as standing in line in a grocery store watching the person in front of us by beer, cigarettes, candy etc., and then see this person hand the cashier food stamps as payment? Not all that uncommon.