Remember the compassionate conservative meme which gained wide currency in the time of Bush, that we already have free universal health care because anyone can show up at an emergency room and be treated for free?

That model of free universal health care just took a gunshot wound to the shoulder:

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.”