Wayne Greene: If you're poor in Tulsa, don't get sick

The survey is a fascinating look at how well Tulsans are doing in their day-to-day lives. It gauges everything from how we feel the Police Department treats us to whether we would recommend that a friend live here. Some 22,500 surveys were sent out, and the Gallup people parsed up the results along racial, geographic and income lines.

Here’s a number that jumped off the page at me: 36 percent of the people of Tulsa have experienced a time in the past year when they didn’t have enough money to pay for health care or medicine for themselves or a member of their family.

Among people who earn less than $27,000 a year, the number was 61 percent.

If you’re poor in Tulsa, watch out.

It’s a crisis invisible to a lot of the comfortably insured middle class people of Tulsa. We go about our lives secure in the knowledge that if we get sick or injured, we’ll have the resources to be made whole. We pull out the insurance card at the doctor’s office, handle the copay and, from there, concentrate on getting well.

It’s a different story for the uninsured. They get sick and either seek the help of charities, pray that their problem goes away, or, if it’s bad enough, head to the emergency room — the only place that can’t turn them away.

The result is higher insurance costs for employers and individuals, higher hospital costs for everyone and emergency rooms clogged with people who should have been treated in doctor’s offices.

State policy has knowingly created an underclass of people — mostly employed in low-wage jobs — who can’t afford to get sick. They don’t earn enough for “Obamacare” subsidies and they don’t qualify for Medicaid, which Oklahoma essentially reserves for children, pregnant women, the aged and the disabled.

Thus, more than a third of your neighbors had to make the wrong medical choice last year because they just couldn’t afford to do anything else.

Oklahoma’s policy of denying coverage to the poor magnifies eventual health crises and costs.

People with high cholesterol never have it checked by a doctor. Obese people never get their blood sugar tested.

Manageable conditions aren’t managed.

And so, poor, sick Tulsans eventually roll into the emergency room on gurneys, incapacitated by strokes, heart attacks or diabetic crises.

It makes Oklahoma sicker, poorer and less productive.

Oklahomans pay the same “Obamacare” taxes as the people in Arkansas. But in Arkansas, which accepted Medicaid expansion, the residents have a safety net that ensures health care coverage. The federal government is paying for 90 percent of the cost of that program, and the resulting infusion of money caused the state economy to grow enough to finance a sales tax cut.

In Arkansas, federal money helps pay for residential mental health and substance abuse programs. In Oklahoma, it’s all on the state’s dime.

In Arkansas, federal money is there for sick prison inmates. In Oklahoma, state taxpayers pick up those costs.

All of that because our legislators have been too stubborn to accept the “Obamacare” money.

And so, more than a third of your neighbors have to wonder if that persistent cough is just a cold or the first sign of a horrible scenario.

Here’s the terrifying truth of being uninsured in Oklahoma: A broken bone can turn your poverty into a crisis with no possible recovery; a virus can wreck your family’s future.

American values of working hard, dreaming big and saving for the future are meaningless if a traffic accident can leave you disabled and destitute.