Discrimination in the health-care system demands our outrage

Rosa Parks, an ordinary black woman, refused to get up and give her seat on the bus to a white man. With this simple act of defiance of both the law and custom, the modern civil rights movement began the ongoing struggle to teach equality and for this nation to become finally free from continued racial slavery.

Today the injustice that we all experience is the American health-care system. In our country today, there is still gross discrimination in the health and medical outcomes based upon race and income, insurance or no insurance, job or no job. But where is the outrage?

Recently, I felt that anger. I am a pediatrician. My job is to help care for children, but my job is becoming increasing difficult. The last patient of the morning was new to me. She was 11 years old. She was with her mother and half sister, a 2-year-old.

After a simple introduction and welcome, I asked the mother how I could serve her. She began to tell her daughter's story.

The child was crying about everything. She was sad. She was having trouble sleeping, eating, existing. She was depressed, severely depressed. She looked depressed and acted depressed. Then the mother began to elaborate on the history of her child.

She was one of three children, all from different fathers. The girl's father died but had never been part of her life, only he would call occasionally. The man who was the father of the second child sexually abused her. He is not in jail but somewhere in Texas.

Her first half sister, the daughter of the child molester, has some emotional disorder and is in the custody of the grandmother. The siblings cannot be together so my patient must go to a different school.

The apartment where they lived was burglarized at Christmas. Afterward they learned the occupants, right above them, were running a meth lab, and the mother was threatened with her life. They are in hiding.

Now the rage kicks in.