However, the benefits nonetheless cannot obscure the truth at the core of these fundraising campaigns: Americans can't get basic medical needs met, and tapping one's social network for cash might sap motivation for other forms of social support.
In practice, they are overcrowded, chaotic churns, where staff struggle simply to service the population, get them fed and exercised, and attend to their basic medical needs.
David Eisen, clinical director for Central City Concern, a private nonprofit agency that provides care for drug addicts and the mentally ill, said people whose basic medical needs were met by prescription drugs costing the state about $90 a month per person, were now going to start showing up in hospital emergency rooms, or jail, where they will cost the state far more.
In those pre-Medicare days older Americans and their families often went broke trying to meet basic medical needs.
The comparatively comprehensive structure and categories of the essential medicines list meet the basic medical needs in China.
She has since had a hysterectomy, undergone rehabilitation after she was hit by a luggage cart at an airport, suffered increasing pains in her feet because of her diabetes, and succeeded in getting government assistance to take care of basic medical needs.
With the stealthy encroachment of profit into an institution that was set up to meet basic medical needs, the NHS is being comprehensively marketised.
But the cutbacks effectively leave the companies providing insurance to their healthy members, while tens of thousands of elderly patients with serious diseases like cancer have no affordable insurance coverage for their basic medical needs.
