Undocumented and dying: The patients the system wants to ignore | Ricochet
When he opened the note, Dr. Caulford realized it was a $4,000 hospital bill for a 17-year-old girl who’d finally been treated for sickle cell disease, which can cause strokes, brain damage and death.
“She’d almost died in our emergency department because she’d been turned away,” Dr. Caulford told me on a Saturday afternoon as we sat inside one of the few small rooms of the volunteer-led Canadian Centre for Refugee and Immigrant HealthCare in Scarborough, Ont.
“Because she didn’t have a health card.”
Aisha (whose name has been changed to protect her privacy) had come to Canada as a sponsored refugee five years prior. But even after going “through all the channels,” said Dr. Caulford, she remained uninsured and undocumented, with no social or health insurance to her name.
As Dr. Caulford would soon learn, her case wasn’t isolated.