Indian Health is Being Bushwhacked

Reprinted by permission from the Albuquerque Tribune Online

By Eddie Chuculate
Albuquerque Tribune

Instead of cutting staff and services at Albuquerque's Indian Health Services clinic, officials should be doubling physicians, nurses and space to serve the city's growing American Indian population.

But that's kind of hard when President Bush is spending twice as much medical money on federal convicts as he is on American Indians to whom he is obligated to provide care under U.S. treaty.

The acting chief executive officer of the Indian Health Services bureau in Albuquerque said recently she has proposed cutting half of the clinic's 143-employee work force, which would include most of the 14 doctors. I guess that means instead of waiting four months to get on a waiting list for eyeglasses, it'll be about a year.

Gross underfunding means many times patients are not seen unless it's a life-or-limb situation, and that's not a figure of speech. There are enough horror stories to fill a volume of encyclopedias.

A stillborn baby boy was delivered in an Eagle Butte, S.D., facility after strangling on its umbilical cord. An ultrasound would have discovered this in time, but the baby's mother wasn't allowed it because she had already had her one ultrasound per pregnancy. Years ago, my sister nearly died of Rocky Mountain spotted tick fever in an Oklahoma City children's hospital after a physician in an Indian Health Services hospital failed to diagnose it.

Tom Daschle, the Democratic senator from South Dakota, recently proposed that Bush increase the agency's funding $3.44 billion to bring it to barely operable levels. He said a slight reduction in Bush's tax cut for millionaires would have easily funded this.

Instead, in his 2005 budget proposal Bush upped the agency's budget to $2.1 billion from $2 billion. This has prompted the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to declare: "The anorexic budget of IHS can only lead one to deduce that less value is placed on Indian health than that of other populations."

A proposal in Albuquerque would have Bernalillo County's indigent American Indians be seen at the University of New Mexico Hospital. Is going homeless and roving Central Avenue, or flopping around in front of the old Blue Spruce or in a Downtown park, what it takes to get prompt medical attention?

Someone needs to explain how a brand new Indian Health Services clinic with medical, dental, diabetes, pharmacy, X-ray, maternal and child health care can be built in Tulsa, Okla., yet Albuquerque, a similar sized if not larger city serving more than 20,000 Indians, is cutting staff in half at a dilapidated, hand-me-down facility dating to pre-World War II.

Face it, the urban Indian population is only going to grow as Indians spurn reservations to find jobs and better health care. More money needs to go there. With the billions of dollars Bush is throwing away in Iraq instead of on suffering Americans, one could do worse than move to Baghdad.

Reagan remembered: Ronald Reagan was a likable old Joe, granted, but he'll always be remembered among many American Indians, this one included, for telling students in 1983 at Moscow State University in Russia: "We have provided millions of acres of land for what are called preservations, or reservations I should say. . . . and they're (Indians) free also to leave the reservations and be American citizens among the rest of us, and many do. . . . Maybe we made a mistake. Maybe we should not have humored them in wanting to stay in that kind of primitive lifestyle. Maybe we should have said, no, come join us, be citizens along with the rest of us." As I said, this was 1983, not 1883.

Eddie Chuculate (Creek/Cherokee) is a Tribune copy editor who writes about American Indian issues. His column appears on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month. Reach him at (505) 823-3677 or echuculate@abqtrib.com