On dialysis treatment, Afghanistan war and greed

The October 4 closing of a Dialysis center in Atlanta has thrown over 50 undocumented immigrants into a life or death limbo as they struggle desperately to figure out what to do, The New York Times reported. These patients received life-sustaining treatment at Atlanta's Grady Center, a tax-payer supported safety-net hospital that provided dialysis to anyone regardless of immigration status. The shutting down of the facility left 51 people with few alternatives.

[For] the dialysis patients, the sudden end to their reassuring routine has prompted a panic.

“We didn’t know what to do,” said Ignacio G. Lopez, 23, who had been sustained by the clinic for more than three years. “We can pass away if we stay like two weeks without dialysis. They were just sending us out to die.”

They work as janitors, housemaids, boss boys and day laborers. All are undocumented and none can afford health insurance. The cost of providing such care per patient is about $50,000 a year. That's a substantial amount, considering that it could finance 20 soldiers in Afghanistan, at $1 million each; or be 1/100,000th (one hundred thousandth) of the $5 billion bonus pool for taxpayer-bailed-out Goldman Sacks to reward stellar employees.