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I would hardly call it a "free ride" if a person busts @ss for years working minimum wage so some CEO can get rich and then that person gets sick and can't afford health care.

So who exactly deserves to die in your opinion?

What PLANET are you on?

Where I come from, it's common for people to have to choose between medicine and food, because they can't afford both.

Had it not been for the Health Care bill passing, I WOULD HAVE died because my family can't afford my medication out-of-pocket.

And the only way I was even able to have medication in the first place is because my dad was lucky enough to land a white collar job that HAS insurance benefits..

Last edited by Bethie on 14 Sep 2010, 10:09 am, edited 1 time in total.

He thinks Foxconn's Shenzhen factory is a great business model to be emulated.

i am definitely NOT middle-class, nor am i flat broke, but i never had sufficient cushion of duckies to be able to afford real health insurance. what i have just covers some of my expenses if i am in a catastrophe. no routine care, no prescription drug coverage. all out of my own thin pocketbook. i am sick from something or other most of the time and untreated for this reason. the local doc in a box charges $200 clams just to set foot inside their damned office. [btw they accept cash only- who in the hell carries that much moolah around?] and this scant level of coverage cost me most of what i make. i would submit that people in my state of affairs are the real victims of our dysfunctional and immorally mercenary health care financing system. the cognitive elites [who happen to live in the middle and upper classes] with plentiful and never-ending income streams never worry about availability of their own health care, only the regular struggling folk with too much week and not enough $$$ must make do without. no other western civilization treats its OWN working-class citizens like this.

It boggles my mind when universal health care opponents trot out some 1984 "euthanasia" fantasy story,
while opposing health care affordability that is the only thing standing between hundreds of thousands of people and DEATH.

how about tens of millions? ALL american citizens deserve better than this!

The ironic thing is they talk about rationing healthcare like as if their opposition of universal health care isn't itself a much worse rationing of healthcare.

Idiots will take in any garbage that they're told so long as it's preached by some pink-faced half-wit.

Go to the Emergency Room and blood over their floor. You will receive care at public expense. it is against the law to turn anyone away at the Emergency Room.

ruveyn

Exactly.

It's hard to bleed all over the floor when your condition is chronic and requires medication.

Bleeding all over is a very rare condition; most people need medical care for more mundane problems, and the treatment for those is both lower quality and less available for those whose only access to care is the ED. Just as a very basic example, someone who shows up in the ED with walking pneumonia, not significant enough to warrant admission to the hospital, will receive enough antibiotics for that day and a script for more antibiotics from a pharmacy the next day. Guess what? The pharmacy is going to charge them for those antibiotics; sometimes, it's going to charge them quite a lot. Guess what happens if they don't have the money to pay that pharmacy? They take a partial course of antibiotics, which may weaken the bug enough for them to fight it off, or may not. If the former, the best outcome is that the situation contributed to the development of antibiotic resistance and the patient lost money from taking time off of work; if the latter, that patient (who might have been cured w/o hospital care had they received a full course of antibiotics from the start) ends up in the hospital with full-blown pneumonia. Oh, and don't forget that they might try to work through the pneumonia (if they don't have PTO) as well, and pass on the bug to their co-workers and clients.

Another case: guy with chest pain. Does he go into the ED? If he's well-insured, yeah. If he's poor and has no intention or ability to pay, yeah. If he's poor, has no insurance, but believes in paying his bills, no; he can't afford a visit to the ED. If he's poor, has bad insurance, and believes in paying his bills, no, because he can't afford the $500 deductable for an ED visit that his insurance charges. So the guy waits a few days or a week to see if the pain goes away, by which time he has permanent heart damage (CHF), which permanently weakens him, depresses his quality of life, and costs the system more than if he had gone in right away and received clot-busting drugs and an immediate trip to the cardiac cath lab.

I could go on; I work in a hospital, and I see these things all the time.

ruveyn is right, though. Neither I nor my wife were in a position to be able to afford insurance--I'd given up teaching in public schools roughly 18 months before my daughter was born, and my wife was fired right after my daughter was born. No one was forthcoming in helping us get the documents we needed to extend insurance to our daughter (after an emergency c-section, I might add), and my premature girl was in the NICU for 3 weeks after that. So guess what? Insurance paid for my wife's stay in the hospital, but the most hideously expensive part of it was the NICU, which put us over $30,000 in the hole.

And that's only a PART of our debt. We're slowly chipping away at what we have. I have a credit card debt hanging over my head to the tune of nearly $2,000 (owed for business-related equipment) that I'll be able to pay off in another month or two with my earnings from my day job. I have two or three smaller debts I'll work off after that. My wife will have her car paid off by December. After that, maybe, just MAYBE we can START paying on that larger hospital bill and try to get out of default on our student loans.

This is the kind of stuff that people eventually file bankruptcy over. My wife happens to work for a bankruptcy lawyer, and it's a system that has traditionally made the people protected by it dependent on it. We're doing our best NOT to cancel our debts at the expense of those we owe money to or at taxpayer expense, but I will say "the system," the legal side of it, the welfare side, the hospital side, and the insurance side are all horribly unfair. My wife and I found ourselves in the emergency room due to a horrible situation to begin with. What is shocking to me is how many people line the chairs in the emergency room over headaches. HEADACHES. And they look at you when you're pregnant and bleeding all over the place like, "Why do YOU get to see the doctor before I do?"

Yet THEY are the ones who get Medicaid to pay for emergency room doctors when they need Tylenol. But when WE apply for Medicaid for our children, they tell us we make too much money because, all together, my wife and I make something around $24,000 a year (very rough guesstimate, it could be less than that). That's less than $24,000 for a family of 4 who just had a run-in with a little bad luck and a bad economy. Why is it the people who DON'T work qualify for something they DON'T NEED and we're the ones staring down the barrel of bankruptcy?

Which leads to healthcare in general. Yes, SOMETHING has got to give. I think the insurance companies need to be subjected to the same kind of anti-trust regulation as the telephone companies were at one time (btw, Verizon is really AT&T, just a different name). If we pay them the big bucks in premiums, we deserve to see our money put towards meeting our health and emergency needs. But don't mandate something that we can't afford. And don't punish us through increased taxes for something the insurance companies, not we, did. There are reasons the cost of healthcare is rising. Find it and fix it. And evaluate who and where the system is being abused and put a stop to it. You got a headache? That's what they make aspirin for. It's cheap, and you can get it at Wal-Mart.

I'm still waiting for Obama to take away the Patriot Act. Dubya started the war even though the U.N. was against it. Why is it so hard for Obama to take away the thing that allows the government to spy on people?

Well Obama ... I'm still waiting.

Making healthcare more affordable and more accesible for everyone, it is a good and nice ideal, and if that is a reality then it is good, it should be praised by christians for the benevolent aspect of it and for biblical references about helping the need, however right-wing christians seem to be against that, ironically.

What? weren't you against capitalism somehow and found socialism interesting or appealing (not that universal healthcare = socialism like rightwingers may claim) or have you become a walmartist?

Um, no, what happens is they treat you and send you a bill...

are you seriously this ignorant?

I don't know if he is seriously going to answer you.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer