Just checking this out, my new years resolutions are to update this more and to read the Internet
Just testing
To answer the woman’s question about how he sleeps at night : probably quite well. He doesn’t have to wonder if he gets sick will he be on the street, will he be allowed to die by bureaucrats.
They’re spending a million dollars a day to scare stupid people into shouting down any discussion. When stupid people get scared they also get violent.
For at least as long as I’ve been alive the Republican party has been very good at getting poor and middle class people to act against their own best interest.
Lately they’ve orchestrated these “town hall shout downs”. Largely put together by Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, they’ve bussed people around to places where there’s supposed to be a discussion about health care reform and explicitly told the people to stand up and shout, to stifle any discussion. The “health care” system is in dire need of an overhaul in this country but any meaningful reform would mean that the insurance companies would no longer be allowed to gouge the American public and therefore they would lose millions or billions of dollars.
They’ve been spending a million dollars a day to stop us from getting a national health care system.
Enter Kenneth Gladney, a moron who went to a town hall meeting to yell and scream so that no meaningful discussion could take place. He got into a fight and fucked up his knee. Thing is, he doesn’t have health insurance. So he’s asking for handouts.
Greatest health care system in the world, by god.
The sense of entitlement there is palpable.
After World War II, England had to reconstruct much of their society. Using American dollars under the Marshall Plan they decided that healthy citizens are an asset to society. Everyone pays into a pool and when you get sick you go see a doctor and are treated. The money to pay for this comes out of taxes. Taxes are the dues you pay to live in a civil society. This is the way England deals with it’s health care to this very day. Every first world country (and some third world countries) handles health care in this manor or something similar to it. Pretty much everyone has figured out that society is better off if people aren’t walking around sick when we have the means to treat the sickness. Almost all of humanity has figured out that certain things shouldn’t be driven by a profit motive. Things like schools, fire departments, and hospitals. These are things which are typically considered to be investments in society.
Every first world country handles health care in this manor, except one. Over on this side of the Atlantic some people think that the best way to maintain the health of it’s citizenry is to put organizations driven by the maximization of profit between citizens and their doctors. Most people don’t think that way anymore but the minority that do are largely the people who are profiting off the illnesses of others and those who still have employer-provided healthcare (tick tock…).
There’s been a movement recently to get the U.S. up to speed with the rest of the civilized world and the people who profit off the illnesses and death of others have been spending millions of dollars to stop it. They’re bussing people from city to city to shout down any discussion of the matter and to disrupt town hall meetings. They’re spreading lies about how the president wants to euthanize the elderly and other outlandish things to fool people into thinking that our system is working. They’re trying to scare everyone.
The one I hear the most often is “They’re trying to get between you and your doctor”. Let me explain why this isn’t true : I don’t have a doctor. I can’t afford health insurance. I run my own business and if I were to take out a policy for my wife and I then I would probably pay about what I pay for my mortgage. The other problem is that I wouldn’t be protected by being in a pool with other insured people. My dad has health insurance through GM because he gave them 30 years of his life in a 100 degree factory. When he almost died from complications with his diabetes he was able to spend a week in a hospital and recover. Even if I could afford health insurance and I needed to spend a week in a hospital the insurance company would have someone do anything it takes to deny me the coverage I’d paid for. This is how they maximize their profit. By finding any way they can to deny coverage to anyone they can for any reason. It’s called recission.
My next door neighbor recently spent four days in a hospital and the bill was over ten thousand dollars. This is why fourteen hundred people a day are declaring bankruptcy in this country because they got sick. If I ever found out that I had some horrible ailment which required extensive treatment I would probably shoot myself in the head before going to the hospital because the cost of the treatment would probably leave my wife homeless. Yet I still hear people parroting the line “we have the best healthcare system in the world!”
We don’t have the best healthcare system in the world. We have the most fucked-up healthcare system in the world. I’m too lazy to look up the exact numbers right now but we spend something like four times more on healthcare than anyone else and are ranked something like 37th.
We are the greediest, most selfish society that I have ever heard of. Did I mention short sighted as well? Having people dying in emergency rooms because they didn’t get treated for something which could have been avoided if only they had access to a doctor sooner costs society far more than an increase in your taxes does. It costs more in dollars but it costs more in other ways as well. But nobody cares about those other ways. Because the only measure we use in this country to determine value is the dollar. If it can’t be measured in dollars then it is worthless to us.
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