Encourage the care
In Sunday’s PDN, Dr. John Wegmann made a coherent appeal for the administration to change the policy that can lead to immigrant children not getting health care.
This policy could cause your child or grandchild to be exposed to an illness that was left untreated.
Why?
Because the parents of the sick child are afraid they will be classed as likely to need public assistance if they take the child to a doctor and thereby lose any possibility of remaining in the US.
Antibiotic resistant infections — tuberculosis, parasites of various kinds — are all treatable by our medical system. Left untreated, they threaten the health of our society.
A person coughs into a hand and holds the post on a public bus with that hand can pass some pretty ugly germs onto the person who grabs the post when the bus lurches.
The bathroom handles on the ferry?
Coins from a cashier?
By stint of long-time attention by our public health departments and clinics all over the country, we have a fairly safe environment when it comes to bad germs.
Take away the monitoring of the health of people in the country and we may lose that safety.
Let’s encourage immigrants to get proper health care, for all our sake’s.
Jenifer Taylor,
Port Townsend