Nicole Robinson

Weeks before Hurricane Katrina landed on our country’s gulf shore, the nation momentarily focused its attention on the dilemma faced by a young family from Virginia.

Susan Rollin Torres, a 26-year-old cancer patient, had a stroke in May after melanoma spread to her brain. She lapsed into a coma and was connected to a life-support system.

Torres drew national attention, not for the disease she was fighting, but rather the tiny fetus clinging to life inside her womb.

On Aug. 2, doctors delivered Torres’ baby about two months prematurely. The baby, Susan Anne Catherine Torres, came into the world weighing just one pound, 13 ounces.

Susan Anne Catherine Torres died Monday.

According to the Associated Press, a Web site was set up to help raise money for the family’s medical bills, and about $600,000 had poured in from people around the world, as of early August.

At about the same time last month, I drove through downtown Eau Claire and had to slow down to stare at the long line forming outside the Chippewa Valley Free Clinic.

While the recent deaths of the Torres’ are sad, I can’t help but wonder if it was worth spending hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of dollars, trying to save baby Susan. When there are nearly 50 million people in this country who can’t afford health insurance, who sometimes go without care for the most basic of ailments, we need to stop and think about what deserves funding.

It’s been well over a decade since the nation started debating how we should handle health care coverage. While there are potential pitfalls to nationalizing the health care system in the United States, moving toward this type of organization would end disparities between millions spent on single risky procedures while others go without basics, like antibiotics.

Our current system treats health care like any other commodity or service on the open market. It’s something we pay for.

By paying top dollar for these goods and services in the medical field, the United States has been able to fund a number of life saving innovations that have touched millions of people.

In my own family, we’ve seen the miracles of modern medicine. My family is genetically prone to heart disease and heart failure. Without recently modern innovations I wouldn’t be here today. A few years before I was born, my father suffered from a massive heart attack and was saved thanks to the quick work not only of doctors, but also defibrillator machines.

Millions of other people have similar stories of family members whose lives were saved by techniques and technology such as chemotherapy or organ transplants.

We need to continue to allocate funding to help people with existing conditions.

But more money needs to be earmarked for preventing these major problems. Maybe that means spending less on medical conditions that impact only a small number of people, such as the Torres case.

In most cases, the cost of care generally would be greatly reduced if we helped people in the earliest stages of their illnesses. Yet the current system does not seem to understand this relatively simple concept.

A recent study of 430 clinics in nine U.S. cities revealed that people without health insurance stood a significantly decreased chance of seeing a physician for timely follow-up care for an illness, according to an Associated Press article published Tuesday.

In the study, 28 percent of clinics attempted to determine how sick the callers were, while 98 percent inquired about their insurance status. Where does this leave a person without insurance who may be suffering from a dangerous infection or a debilitating side effect from prescribed medication? Out in the cold.

Our medical community knows how to do so many amazing things to help our bodies work more smoothly and to help us maintain overall health. Many of them are relatively mundane. It takes a minimal amount of time and money to vaccinate a child. It requires few resources to culture a person’s throat for a strep infection.

There are no easy answers on how to fix the system. If there were, we would have done it by now. But our attention needs to stay focused on the problems with the system if we ever intend to fix it.