Practicing Medicine When Your Patients Have No Health Insurance Just Breaks Your Heart

By: Blanca Mesa 

Sometimes practicing medicine in Florida just breaks your heart. 

Keeping people healthy is every doctor’s ultimate goal.  No healthcare provider wants to see a patient suffer or die needlessly from a preventable condition. 

Unfortunately, Dr. Olveen Carrasquillo, Chief of General Internal Medicine at University of Miami, faces these heart-breaking outcomes routinely in his clinic, where more than 80 percent of the patients have no health insurance. 
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“We want to keep people healthy, “ Dr. Carrasquillo says.  “It’s really devastating when people come in at really advanced states that, with good health care, with good health insurance, could have been prevented.”
Florida is one of just 14 states that has not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. If Florida expanded Medicaid, more than 800,000 Floridians, including nearly a quarter of a million who live in South Florida (Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach) would have access to affordable health insurance.  Expansion would provide  access to medical treatments that improve health and save costs – from diabetes to cardiovascular disease to certain cancers. 

Expanding Medicaid would also help address the racial and ethnic disparities and structural racism that have exacerbated the impacts of COVID-19, the deadly virus that has claimed more than 3,000 lives in Florida to date.

Well before the current economic and health crises,  13 percent of Floridians were uninsured, the country’s fourth-highest rate. In Miami-Dade County, 20 percent of those under age 65 have no health insurance. These numbers are increasing as residents lose their jobs, along with employer-sponsored health insurance in the economic fallout of the pandemic. Medicaid is only available now to very low-income parents of minor children and the disabled. 

“We have a government that’s telling people they don’t need healthcare,” says Dr. Carrasquillo. “So they don’t focus on prevention or wellness. They only come see us when they get sick at the end.”

Access to affordable healthcare means patients get routine exams, get their medicines, and address chronic conditions such as high cholesterol, uncontrolled  blood pressure, and diabetes and asthma.
“We can all agree as a society, that’s what we want for everybody,” he says.