Uninsured Woman, Shoots Herself In Shoulder To Get ER Treatment

By Laura Bassett for Huffington Post

An unemployed Michigan woman who was unable to afford medical treatment for a searing pain in her shoulder took matters into her own hands last week, shooting herself in the shoulder in a last-ditch effort to get into the ER.

Kathy Myers, 41, said she was pushed to the brink of desperation Thursday night because she was “crazy in pain,” and the local hospital emergency room would give her no more than a handful of anti-inflammatory pills.

“Pain will make you do silly, crazy things,” the 41-year-old Niles, Mich., woman said in a YouTube.com interview with News 8 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “I knew they wasn’t going to do anything, again. They said if it wasn’t life-threatening, no health insurance, you can’t get no help.”

In the video, she reenacts how she covered her right shoulder and head with two pillows before pointing her .25-caliber handgun at her own body.

“I took the gun and went ‘Boom!'” she said.

Myers was treated for the gunshot wound at Lakeland Community Hospital and released a few hours later, reports ABCNews.com. She said the self-inflicted wound did not help her achieve her goal.

“It didn’t take the pain away,” she told News 8.

4 Comments

  1. Carolyn Taylor on June 17, 2010 at 11:47 pm

    Turn off your TV and fight for something as important as this! It’s worth fighting for, and your favorite show is not.



  2. Thomas Corriher on June 21, 2010 at 6:58 pm

    The problem here is not her lack of insurance. The problem is that all of the natural, cheap, and effective pain killers have been made illegal, in order to keep us dependent upon the system, so that it can financially bleed us to death. This is by design! Pain killers are kept out of the reach of the poor because the system is designed to keep pricing inflated as much as possible. Therefore, the solution is not having more insurance, which only funnels even more money to the same crooks who caused these problems in the first place. In other words, she should have used that gun at the hospital instead, or at Congress. At least, it would have happened to someone who really deserved to be shot and in pain.



  3. di on July 1, 2010 at 4:37 pm

    Is it a crime to shot yourself…?



  4. John "Hai" Knapp on July 1, 2010 at 5:40 pm

    Should Kathy Meyers be punished for what she did? My vote; the ones responsible for sabotaging our USA healthcare should be justly punished first. Cigna should be charged for the murder of Nataline Sarkisyan.

    I hope that folks come to believe, that single-payer comes quickly,
    hard to believe so many folks think our care’s so great;
    while one bad illness away from bankruptcy! —Fireflies parody

    The ones who has deliberately kept the poor priced out are far more guilty than Kathy ever has been.