Reply #59: Yes. He would have had symptoms for some time before it reached that crisis point.

[yardwork]

Our country has essentially no preventive care for the uninsured. That means that none of their health problems get detected and treated when they are usually treatable. Instead, we have a system where people in crisis - sometimes at death's door - show up in the emergency room and then our system says we're supposed to run around and try to figure out how to deal with the crisis. Sometimes it gets dealt with in time and sometimes not. Either way, once the crisis is over if the uninsured patient is still alive he/she gets pushed out the door with little to no follow-up care and they're on their own again.

The treating people only when they're in crisis part is what makes our health care system the most expensive in the world (by far), even though it's only middling in terms of effectiveness for everybody. It's really lousy in terms of effectiveness for the uninsured.