Interview with Jacque De Fouw 3

4. Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, author, physician, and educator, argued that it is “ethics, not economics, [that] should drive the nation’s health system.” Do you believe that the United States government is more focused on the economics of health care, rather than the ethical aspect? Why?

Well, the health care industry is the largest economic thing in The United States. If the health care industry would fail, we would probably go into a really deep depression or something. It seems that economics rule over ethics at the present time. I would have to say in larger areas, such as the university health care center here, we are very in tune to ethics and what is going on. We are concerned that people get the most care for the smallest amount of money; we’re very fortunate that we can do that. And we do not deal with insurance companies. We don’t take any insurance here, so it’s not something we have to deal with. The politics of it all is very discouraging, and I’m glad I’m not in that system anymore. It’s so discouraging when you have a new mother that really needs to how to take care of a new baby and yet her insurance will only let you pay for that twenty-four hours in the hospital. Or you have someone that have complications from their surgery or they may not have a competent care-giver at home. I mean there are just a hundred different things. And you know that they need care in the hospital for a longer period of time, but they’re prohibited from staying because their insurance will not pay for it, and the hospitals don’t like to have to cover the costs of people staying longer.

5. Does the average University of Memphis student have health insurance? Do you believe that providing University health insurance is the answer for more effective on campus health care? Why?

We do keep statistics on students that do come in here, so that we know how many do have outside health insurance. If a student comes in and needs something further than we can do or they need to see a specialist, we tried to refer them to someone that will be able to handle whatever insurance that they do or don’t have.

6. How would you compare the health center at other universities you have worked versus Memphis’? Would you say that overall, students at The University of Memphis need a better health care system?

I think that having the health care on campus certainly provides access for care for students and I think they wouldn’t seek care as often if they didn’t have some place here to go. And the fact that it is pre-paid through their student access fee, it is very convenient for them to be able to come in and be seen by a doctor or a nurse practitioner and not have a cost involved. We also have the lab and x-ray that frequently there are no charges for, because it’s things that we can do here on campus, whereas, if we do have to send them out, we have to charge. Then we let the student know how much it would cost them. But the fact that we don’t take any insurance is good for students, whether insured or not. I hope that because we have this facility that students don’t think they shouldn’t get insurance, because there are a lot of things that we cannot cover here; I mean if a student were to get hit by a car or have a disease or develop diabetes, we can help them in the crisis, but we can’t manage that occurrence since we don’t have hospitalization or anything like that. Students really should carry their own health insurance, so that if something unplanned happens, they would have some sort of bridge.