“The Secret To Health: Stop Being Sick”

...and the secret to Stop Being Sick?  Die…

Great message we have there.  It’s just too bad we live in such a wealthy society, ‘cause if we lived in a slightly less wealthy society, we’d already be covered.  All of us.

But thank God <strike>reckless Capitalism</strike>, in America™ we still have Freedom (to die as horrible a death as possible because you can’t get health insurance)!  We haven’t allowed ourselves to be controlled by economic fascism like those dirty French, British, Canadians, and all sorts of other dirty furriners…

Sonny should realize this is the kind of “pulling one’s self up by the bootstraps” he advocates in other situations.  Taking out a loan to go to school to better one’s self and not get handouts from John Q. Taxpayer is what people like him should support, no?

lack of insurance isn’t the problem; insurance is the problem. universal health care can’t mean universal health insurance because insurers’ job is to NOT PAY. that’s how they stay profitable.

’m sorry, dude: You made your choice. Maybe you made it poorly, but you made a choice. I have no pity whatsoever for this guy.

No he didn’t.  Going to school isn’t a “decision” like going to the movies or buying a nicer car.  It’s a necessity.  Without education, you don’t get a job.  Without a job, you don’t get any health insurance.  Without health insurance, you don’t get your inhaler.

But forfeiting school doesn’t magically provide our case study with all the inhalers he can breath through.  He’s STILL got to get a job with good enough health insurance to provide coverage for an expensive pre-existing condition.  And then he’s got to pay all the co-pays and deductibles that go along with it.

So no.  He didn’t have a “choice”.  His path was set.  Succeed in law school or fall into unemployment and start living on food stamps and medicaid.  One would think a brave conservative boot strapper like Bunch would applaud the unnamed case study for struggling to move from taker to maker on the social binomial hierarchy.  But, apparently, he just had it too easy.

You’ve gotta think outside of the box.  There are several ways to solve this health care problem.

1) Join the military - they got ya covered.
2) Go to prison - healthcare, plus 3 hots & a cot
3) Become a Senator or other elected official - you get lifetime coverage, like John McCain!

“1) Join the military - they got ya covered.
2) Go to prison - healthcare, plus 3 hots & a cot
3) Become a Senator or other elected official - you get lifetime coverage, like John McCain!”

...4) Choose your parents carefully…

MikeEss says: 4) Choose your parents carefully

I chose Bill & Melinda Gates as my parents, but for some reason, they haven’t been sending along anything nice for my birthday!

I chose Ellen Degeneres and LeBron James as my parents, which has made things really awkward between them.  On the plus side, I got a free Chrysler Town & Country and a signed Mo Williams jersey yesterday.

The same stupid arguments have been made about women receiving welfare who try to go to college, as opposed to working shitty minimum wage jobs.  These arguments are just another way to kick around the marginalized, while making the ‘kicker’ feel good about himself.

I love the people who have never even heard of pre-existing conditions and are under the impression that someone with mild-to-moderate asthma can get private health insurance for $50 a month.

Try more like $400 a month, pal, and that’s if you’re lucky enough to only have one pre-existing condition like mild asthma and not something more serious, like severe asthma or cancer.  I don’t even need an inhaler to keep my asthma under control, and yet private health insurance is out of reach for me.

Seriously, I’m tired of people who won the perfect health lottery or the wealthy parents lottery telling the rest of us that all of our problems are because we’re stupid and lazy.  The fact that you won the lottery is not proof that your financial skills are better than everyone else’s.  It’s just proof that you were randomly lucky.

How much do inhaler refills cost without medication? Is the problem just that he can’t work and go to law school at the same time, so he has 0 extra $$ for it?

Like what i mean is, you don’t need a health care plan to purchase drugs you have a prescription for, it just makes non generic drugs (i imagine there are generic forms of inhaler meds, its been around a while) less expensive.

That being said, that really sucks. It is rather scary how much health care costs out of pocket and how you can’t really pay without a booming business of your own or an employer who gives it to you. My dad’s heart attach ran over $150,000. Most people would have been bankrupted, luckily he had insurance.

Aaaahhh…  So, instead of being an athlete, working out a whole bunch, and then ending up with long-term injuries that cause me constant pain in several joints and will eventually need a bunch of treatment, I should never have even looked sideways at a soccer ball, lacrosse stick, or oar.  Got it. 

But then our intrepid writer would probably call me a fatty and tell me to get my ass up off the couch before I died from heart disease or something.  Win-win, huh?

”...so they need to have some sort of massive delusion that It Won’t Happen To Me Because I Make All The Right Choices. “

Often, your “choices” don’t even come in to play:  Drunk driver hits you (unpredictable), you get cancer (usually unpredictable), have a stroke or a heart attack (usually unpredictable), or an insurance company denies your claim (all too predictable).

So that person who lives an entire lifetime without ever needing any medical more expensive than they can pay for out of pocket is a rarity that ranks up there with big lottery winners…which is the other way to solve the problem of getting healthcare:

5) Win the lottery…

Jesus, how short-sighted can you (by which I mean Bunch) be? Here’s a guy who no doubt is on the track to some sort of success (I’m assuming that if he’s going to a top-tier law school, I’m guessing he has some decent prospects ahead). In a few years, presumably he will use his education and credentials to land a job, which will result in income, which will result in taxes. Statistically, he’s a net gain for the system in every conceivable way, so that even if you are the kind of person who shakes his fist all day long at all those undeserving whoevers that will somehow hypothetically sponge off an actual universal healthcare system (as I assume Bunch is), you’ve got to admit that by taking care of this guy at the current stage instead of letting him die, we win. We win big. And yet conservatives still want to kick people like him while they’re down. It’s pretty obvious to me that conservative opposition to UHC has nothing to do with practical outcomes and everything to do with their misguided sense of cosmic justice which, FSM forbid, will somehow fail to be meted out if people are guaranteed access to basic health services.

Apparantly someone got a little extreme in their anger towards Bunch in the comments section of his blog post, and Sonny the douche has taken it upon himself to not only attack poor people, but to attack anyone of Muslim faith, as well…

Commenter “Bob” wrote:

You really deserve to have your head severed off, you insufferable pile of crap. Please do earth a favor and commit suicide.

Obviously, “Bob” made a trollish and unconstructive comment.  But rather than calling out the trollish and unconstructive comment, how does douchebag Bunch respond?

Yikes. Didn’t realize that the prophet Muhammed was an asthmatic.

Nice.  What an asshat.

2) Go to prison - healthcare, plus 3 hots & a cot

In Outer Wingnuttia, this might be a viable choice.  Here in the real world, you get shitty food, an environment defined by brutality, and seriously deficient health care.

In 2009, to say that you shouldn’t do something without secure, affordable health insurance is to often say that you shouldn’t do anything at all.

This is exactly why the unemployment rate among the disabled is still about 70%, dispite the ADA. It is not the only reason, discrimination still plays a factor, but it is a biggie.

People with disabilities by definition have pre-exisiting conditions, many who need ongoing health care. They also are less likely to be able to find and keep steady employment. (i.e. employer gets you adaptive computer equipment to do job, technology changes, employer is less likely to keep working with you to update your adaptive tech, you are out.) Their only recourse is to get on disability, Medicare and NOT WORK. I hear it all the time, “my disability doesn’t really prevent me from working, lack of universal healthcare does. If I work, I could die.”

So, taxpayers are paying for that as well. Because people like this guy are so unbelievably stupid. And I love how people think they are going to be healthy forever. They will live till 85 and then suddenly get sick one day and drop dead. Like they will never have any catastrophic illness that will bankrupt them and/or put their health insurance in jeopardy. We all will need it sometime.

rowmyboat, you have my sympathies.  I recently worked with a guy who spent two weeks in the NFL as a walk-on.  He still hurts from it to this day.

The standard articulated above creates a soft form of social eugenics, where only the hale, monied and hearty should do things which might require risk; if you dare enter this world infirm or do anything which could make you so, well, sucks to be you.

No, it’s medical Calvinism, aka radical predestinarianism as manifested in health (my emph):

It’s fascinating to watch well-educated secularists who recoil at the Protestant obsession with personal virtue, prosperity as a cardinal sign of election by God, and total responsibility for one’s own salvation turn into fire-eyed, moralizing True Believers when it comes to the subject of Taking Responsibility For One’s Own Health.

They’ll insist that health, like salvation, is entirely in our own hands. If you just have the character and self-discipline to stick to an abstemious regime of careful diet, clean living, and frequent sweat offerings to the Great Treadmill God, you’ll never get sick. (Like all good theologies, there’s even an unspoken promise of immortality: f you do it really really right, they imply, you might even live forever.) The virtuous Elect can be discerned by their svelte figures and low cholesterol numbers. From here, it’s a short leap to the conviction that those who suffer from chronic conditions are victims of their own weaknesses, and simply getting what they deserve. Part of their punishment is being forced to pay for the expensive, heavily marketed pharmaceuticals needed to alleviate these avoidable illnesses. They can’t complain. It was their own damned fault; and it’s not our responsibility to pay for their sins. In fact, it’s recently been suggested that they be shunned, lest they lead the virtuous into sin.

The costs of healthcare are a way that the fortunate and wealthy (or usually both) tell those with medical misfortune to know their fucking place.

mnemeth said: “How much do inhaler refills cost without medication? Is the problem just that he can’t work and go to law school at the same time, so he has 0 extra $$ for it?
Like what i mean is, you don’t need a health care plan to purchase drugs you have a prescription for..”

As an asthmatic (now with insurance), the problem is getting the prescription. An initial appointment with a nurse practioner which is generally the least expensive way to go can run around $200.  If you go to an actual doctor, which I try to avoid, they like to run all kinds of tests which ups the price even more.  The albuterol inhalers themselves only cost around $35.00 or so.  Of course, if you have serious asthma, the preventative medication to keep from over using the albuterol can run around $300 a month.  When I didn’t have insurance I would get my mother to send me her albuterol inhalers and would get samples of the steroid medication from a nurse practitioner friend.

The same stupid arguments have been made about women receiving welfare who try to go to college, as opposed to working shitty minimum wage jobs.

I was recently shocked to find out (through others’ experiences, not mine fortunately) that you can’t go to school while collecting unemployment benefits, even if you started taking the classes before you were laid off, even if they’re night classes and won’t interfere with a job search or taking a job offer, even if it improves your chances of landing a new job.  Sheer lunacy.

Like what i mean is, you don’t need a health care plan to purchase drugs you have a prescription for, it just makes non generic drugs (i imagine there are generic forms of inhaler meds, its been around a while) less expensive.

Depends on what you need.  In my experience as an uninsured person (though I finally have a job with insurance, thank God), Costco’s pharmacy had by far the cheapest prices, but even they will charge you $168 for a 30-day supply of Advair.  Even generic albuterol can set you back a pretty penny depending on what dosage you need.

Hint for the uninsured in California:  by California law, Costco has to let you use their pharmacy even if you’re not a Costco member.  It will save you a ton of money if you don’t have prescription coverage.

As an asthmatic (now with insurance), the problem is getting the prescription. An initial appointment with a nurse practioner which is generally the least expensive way to go can run around $200.

That might be why in countries with universal health care you can often get a prescription for those kinds of drugs directly from a pharmacist.  All this middle man bullshit is entirely about insurance companies (and doctors) collecting more money and putting up roadblocks to treatment.

I need to check out the Costco pharmacy when it opens here.  That would save me a pretty penny on my advair.  My co-pay is $50 a month, even with insurance coverage.

you can’t go to school while collecting unemployment benefits, even if you started taking the classes before you were laid off, even if they’re night classes and won’t interfere with a job search or taking a job offer, even if it improves your chances of landing a new job.  Sheer lunacy.

Nope. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Another case of unnecessary “sympathy”.  This person doesn’t need sympathy for the embarrassment of stealing inhalers, the comment isn’t even about his needs at all.  Focusing on one situation just ignores the real issue and is meant as a diversion to make us forget that we aren’t the best place in the world.

i’m sure most pandagonians know my healthcare story by now, i had a birth defect in my right kidney, which was corrected, but i continued to form stones in that kidney that have to be broken up surgically in order to pass. back when i was still covered by my mothers insurance and then through the hella expensive COBRA payments i had a total of 15 surgeries, due for another. then COBRA ran out. that was 5 years ago. i still havent gotten that surgery, and have learned to deep breath through pain that would knock out most people. i apply for medicaid, they reject me for a lark, as they always do. i’m applying again soon, hopefully this time i get approval.

i even did what the wingnuts want me to, i found the sort of job you find without a college education, waiting tables for a big corporate chain with really nice health insurance. i got all the insurance they had to offer, but i never got to use it, if i had missed enough work for my surgery i would have, wait for it, lost my insurance. squee!

so now i’m in college part time and hoping i can get on disability in order to get medical care. if i don’t die in the meantime.

oh, and my junior college doesn’t offer any insurance.

2) Go to prison - healthcare, plus 3 hots & a cot

In Outer Wingnuttia, this might be a viable choice.  Here in the real world, you get shitty food, an environment defined by brutality, and seriously deficient health care.

Which for a lot of people, is exactly like the life they’re currently living, only with a much smaller chance of being shot.

Mnemosyne: I assumed that the guy was talking about something more expensive than albuterol—steroids or long-acting beta-agonists—just because he said “daily inhalers”; although if he’s using albuterol every day then that’s just a sign of a different problem, i.e. needing a doctor.

Mnemeth: I know this was just a typo and you meant “without insurance,” but “How much do inhaler refills cost without medication?” made me smile. Cheapest plan ever: placebos for all!

Anyway - what really gets me about this particular style of winger bullshit is that they don’t realize how anti-capitalist their attitude is. Once they determine that they don’t like someone, because that someone is a liberal or is asking for government help or whatever, they just come up with reasons why it’s irresponsible and contemptible for that person to do anything at all beyond paying for their most basic needs… even when, as in the case of this person going to law school and any self-employed entrepreneur ever, the effect of this “don’t even think about it unless you’re invulnerable” rule is to stifle productive risk-taking.

There’s some value in the Horatio Alger myth. If someone is determined enough to spend 4 years living in a supply closet and eating ramen noodles while they work on their professional training or their crazy business idea, more power to them; that shouldn’t be the only way to go, but we do need those people. That’s a choice and it can be a noble one. But you can’t do that if you might die, or if your baby might die, because of some stupid infirmity that would be absolutely no problem in any other civilized country. People like Bunch are basically saying that we should just write off a significant chunk of the population from either pursuing or contributing to the American dream.

People like Bunch are basically saying that we should just write off a significant chunk of the population from either pursuing or contributing to the American dream.

Exactly - we all hear all the wonderful things about entrepreneuership, but it’s always that middle-aged guy with a working spouse, or the young go-getter with wealthy parents ...

That’s because health care is a huge obstacle to people leaving their day jobs, even when they already have a successful business that will scale up very nicely.

Unfortunately, the health care debate is showing signs of bogging down. It’s becoming all about the poor, beleagured insurance companies, like it always is. Health care policy is to concern trolls what a pile of sugar is to an ant colony.

You’ve gotta think outside of the box.  There are several ways to solve this health care problem.

1) Join the military - they got ya covered.

The military won’t let you in if you have asthma.  I have a cousin who would’ve joined but couldn’t, because of that, and a few years later when I was “considering” it (i.e. at a point in my life when I was incapable of saying “no” to anything, especially to someone as nice and friendly as a military recruiter), they sent me home to get medical records because I used an inhaler for a month when I was five (for chronic bronchitis).

Ditto AIDS, and I suspect many physical disabilities and “preexisting conditions” are dealbreakers where the military is concerned.

      2) Go to prison - healthcare, plus 3 hots & a cot

  In Outer Wingnuttia, this might be a viable choice.  Here in the real world, you get shitty food, an environment defined by brutality, and seriously deficient health care.

Which for a lot of people, is exactly like the life they’re currently living, only with a much smaller chance of being shot.

I wonder how the country, government, populace, et cetera would react, if we had a sudden slew of people deliberately getting caught committing crimes, and admitting to the judge that they did it so they’d be caught and go to prison so they could get the health care they need.

In conservatism, you deserve what you can afford.  All rights are determined by what’s in your bank account, whether rich or poor.

I hope this guy’s insurance situation takes a turn for the better.  A friend has asthma and her attacks are scary to watch.

I started to think that at least Jesse could drive to Windsor to get his Rx’s filled but then I realized:

Even though I live well south of the border, as of Friday at midnight I became Canadian. Sayonara y’all, eh?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDeDQpIQFD0

Yo Hector - good on ya!  My Dad became Canadian too!

One thing in response to Awkward’s story is that it’s relatively easy to get catastrophic health insurance for between jobs. It’s private, not COBRA, and certainly not cheap. That’s what we did when my husband was transitioning between jobs, though we didn’t have to use it, thankfully. Then again, I think it was $600 for a month….

I once had someone who knew I was sick tell me that he would never hire someone he knew was chronically ill.  ADA be damned.  He would just find another reason to not hire them.

What I have is covered by the ADA but can’t really qualify as a disability for SSI purposes unless I lose a massive amount of weight.  Living in a country where I have health insurance no matter what puts me in an awful position because I feel like I’m wasting my time here being kicked around by people who treat me badly for being foreign, but at the same time I can’t go home because I’d be screwed if my intestines exploded.  So I’m just biding my time, waiting for some kind of national health system ...

Whenever people give me advice it does seem to fall into the category of “stop being sick.”  They casually mention that I should “just” do this or that, not taking into account that I have to consider my health needs in all of this.  It’s limiting me in what I can do and I’m watching my life slip by while I’m unbelievably unhappy with my situation, and I have no options.  Healthy friends say, “Of course you have options!”  They think by saying “no, I don’t” that I’m just limiting myself.

Why don’t able-bodied people seem to get it?  Six years of this and I STILL have to remind the same people that no, there isn’t a cure and no, I can’t just eat differently and make it go away ...

The sheer “fuck you”-ness of the column actually makes me want to hunt this guy down and beat the living shit out of him. Blatant, in-your-face elitism that just proves what a lot of people have been saying all along—it’s not about what’s right or good for our culture, it’s about wingnuts feeling special.

I feel like smacking this asshole with a wet fish, preferably something really huge like a halibut.  Sometimes it’s possible to do everything right and still be diagnosed with something that will make you unable to buy private insurance.

Take me.  A few years back I decided to get my hearing tested because I thought I was starting to get hard of hearing like my father.  Turned out the hearing loss was all on one side, so the ENT sent me in for an MRI just in case it was more than age and heredity. 

Well, it was more.  I have an acoustic neuroma.  This is a benign tumor on the balance nerve in my right ear.  It causes tinnitus (chronic and incurable), occasional vertigo and balance problems (endurable), and partial deafness (incurable and probably progressive).  It won’t kill me, but it has to be checked via MRI once a year to see if it’s grown.  If it hasn’t grown, I don’t need to have surgery to remove it.  If it has, well, that means brain surgery before it gets big enough to press on my brain stem and cut off my breathing, a month’s recuperation, and permanent deafness on the right.

And of course it means that I can’t get private insurance.  Period.  I have a big fat expensive pre-existing condition that means either an expensive yearly test for the rest of my life, or expensive brain surgery at a hospital in Boston, a month off work, and partial disability.  There is no private insurer in the world that would take me, and because of this I’m almost certainly going to stay in Massachusetts for the rest of my working life because at the least I’d get Commonwealth Care.

Best of all, here are the risk factors that I so callously ignored that gave me my neuroma: 

NONE.

That’s right.  There are no known risk factors in my case.  Zero.  Zip.  Nada nada nada.  About 2,000 people a year are diagnosed with AN, and unless they have a certain genetic condition, there is nothing they could have done to prevent it. 

I wonder what Mr. Asshole Conservative would say to me?

Antigone: I think these people have just flat-out shut-off any form of empathy that may have had for the human condition, because no matter what people did to live the “right” way, it’s not good enough for these conservatives.

I suspect that their empathy never gets out of the intial “that could be me” stage, because instead of using this impulse for understanding, or making life better, they get stuck with arguing why it could not be them. And since every case gets argued anew, there’s no such thing as rules that last from one case to the next. Because every consistent rule would say it could be them.

“I’m sorry, dude”?  “I’m sorry, dude”???  You total bastard!  It’s bad enough, you being a halfwit rightwing prick spouting typically ignorant bullshit, but “I’m sorry, dude”?  Too much; I hope you die in horrible agony, very soon.

I’m with you, BrianX.

keshmeshi: I was recently shocked to find out (through others’ experiences, not mine fortunately) that you can’t go to school while collecting unemployment benefits,

Yes, because if you are not willing to take a job, any job, at a moments notice, you are obviously lazy and thus undeserving. And if you would take that job frying chips and drop out of school from one day to the next, well, can’t have people who are just waiting for a job offer hanging out in class. And I can hear in my head the complaints about “lazy people on the dole trying to get a better job than I have with my tax money!”

It goes back to this whole sucky “deserving/undeserving” dichtonomy, which needs to be drowned in a river.

I wonder what Mr. Asshole Conservative would say to me?

“Fuck off and die?”

Seriously.  That’s all he’s got.  That’s why I totally sympathize with the people wanting to beat the shit out of him.  He’s a complete waste of carbon; the racism is just icing on the cake.

Jesus fucking H.C. Christ on a crutch. With the utmost sincerity I hope this Sonny asshole comes down with an extremely painful, incurable, terminal illness, real soon now. He won’t be missed.

Ashley, six hundred dollars a month is a lot to come up with for many, many people.  And even if the law student referenced in the original post could scrounge up that kind of cash, asthma is not generally considered a catastrophic illness.  Even though it can kill you if it goes untreated.  But hey, he could get pneumonia, and that might qualify!  If the insurance company didn’t decide that it was part of his asthma and thus declined to pay on the grounds that it arose from a preexisting condition.

This story is exactly why I so despise current conservative ideology - it justifies being selfish, ego-centric, and cruel.  It’s all about “me, me, me!” and “mine, mine, mine!”

Add in the hypocrisy of so many right-wingers claiming this is a “Christian” country (I use the term loosely), and it’s enough to make my head explode.  After all, if this was a “Christian” country, the right-wing conservatives would be pushing for universal healthcare and other social safety nets because those things are mandated RIGHT IN THEIR OWN (censored) SCRIPTURE!!  Said by Jesus, no less (and not that idiot Paul).

“I was hungry, and you fed me.  I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink.  I was naked, and you clothed me.  I was sick, and you took care of me.  I was in prison, and you came to visit me… As you have done unto the least of these, so you have done unto me.”

And *that’s* why I, an unrepentant human secularist, am a Democrat.

There are cases where this is not true, although I think it has to do with when you started the education.

I think it may have more to do with the state you live in and what their unemployment rules are.  I’m pretty sure that you can be on unemployment and go to school here in California, because when I was unemployed in 2001, they were constantly sending me brochures for job training courses.

I think the line they draw is that you need to actually be unemployed (laid off).  You can’t graduate from high school and immediately apply for unemployment to pay for college.

And what are you supposed to do if you do everything right - born wealthy and white, avoid cancer through the magic of Calvinist worthiness - and then your child is born with an expensive condition?  I have a friend, wealthy, white, educated, with a child who has been uninsurable since birth and always will be.  I get the feeling no Republican would have wanted my friend to have an abortion, but I am not sure what the alternative is supposed to be….if my friend weren’t highly paid, with awesome health insurance (paid by the state, guffaw), the child would have died by now.  I really doubt Medicaid pays millions for neurosurgery (11 times and more coming).

remember lord of the flies?

“sucks to your assmar, piggy!”

yeah, it’s like that.

And what are you supposed to do if you do everything right - born wealthy and white, avoid cancer through the magic of Calvinist worthiness - and then your child is born with an expensive condition?

Well, clearly your friend wasn’t really worthy since God punished him/her with a disabled child, so s/he needs to spend the rest of his/her life repenting the horrible sins that made God so angry.

/asshole Calvinist

When I was in grad school, and working three jobs I frequently had to borrow the $120 month it cost to get my inhalers to (barely) keep breathing (albuterol and cortisone).  Should I have taken on a forth job just to make sure?  I mean, I could have gotten by without those four hours of sleep a night. 

Now that I’m on Advair, I am no longer using my rescue inhaler 4+ times a day, but my cost with insurance is $60 a month for that alone.  If I lose my insurance, my cost will go up to $160 a month, at the same time that even if I can get unemployment it will only pay out roughly 2/3 of my current salary. 

Without either the one $160 inhaler or the two $120 (together) inhalers I will die.  It’s not an ‘if,’ it’s a when.  And probably pretty quickly. 

Our health care (non)system is so completely fucked.

no, Mnemosyne. The friend was so worthy that god decided to give her the joy of working through this particular challenge…

You know what used to kill a fair number of rich people in the era before antibiotics and medicaid? Getting breathed on by poor people.

Self-styled conservatives still don’t get the fact that public health is a win-win proposition. They’d rather have someone be sick and unproductive, and possibly even infecting others, than well and productive if it means a poor person not paying an inflated enough price for something.

Oh, and steve: nothing terminal. Something middling expensive, painful and chronic.

Should only the independently wealthy (or those whose spouses have good employer-provided health insurance) be able to be ... entrepreneurs, small business owners, independent contractors ...?

This is one thing I don’t get. Republibertarians are always going on about the value of entrepreneurship and the number of jobs created by small business. Yet lack of universal health care discourages entrepreneurship and working in small businesses, in favor of suckling a corporate or government teat.

I was recently shocked to find out (through others’ experiences, not mine fortunately) that you can’t go to school while collecting unemployment benefits, even if you started taking the classes before you were laid off, even if they’re night classes and won’t interfere with a job search or taking a job offer, even if it improves your chances of landing a new job.  Sheer lunacy.

keshmeshi

“Because bettering yourself is only for the wealthy and even then only for spa trips and the purchase of private islands. You, peon, will work until you die. Suck to be born without a trust fund! Oh by the way you should be REALLY CONCERNED about a “death tax” even though it doesn’t affect you but it affects us. How WILL my 4th child, Kenley ever be able to upgrade his Bentley?”

*commences screaming inwardly again*

no, Mnemosyne. The friend was so worthy that god decided to give her the joy of working through this particular challenge…

That’s what people say to her face.  Behind her back, they’re gossiping about how God hates her and what a horrible person she must be. 

Ask me how I know about what these assholes are really saying.  How I managed to not punch one in the face who actually told me that my mother died of cancer because she wanted to die, I’ll never know.

So the guy should give up his chance for upward mobility/dream of being a lawyer because he has asthma?

Sonny, you’re a douche.

Kyra,

I read a story about a man who did just that.  He needed some pain medication that his insurance wouldn’t cover, and he stole it, ended up in jail, and now gets his meds courtesy of the state.

RE: the lack of empathy, thinking it can’t happen to them.  Even when it does happen to them, conservatives often lack empathy.  I read quotes from several Teabaggers who were on some form of government assistance, or who didn’t pay taxes, complaining about the nanny state and people freeloading off other’s taxes.  The general attitude is, “My situation is different.  I really need this.  Other people are the ones freeloading.”

Everyone:  can we do something besides complain about our screwed-up health care system?  I learned recently about the May 30th National Day of Action for universal healthcare (http://www.healthcare-now.org/)—can we make this a bigger event than the Tea Parties?

Everytime I see one of these things, I just have one response: “National Healthcare NOW mother fuckers”. That’s it. Just recite it over and over and over again.

Because there is really not a damned thing else to do. Universal Care. Now.

I seldom comment anywhere, but I made two to these guys.  1:

Actually, uniondad, I personally am a US citizen who emigrated to the socialist utopian country of New Zealand last August. My husband and I were professionals with good insurance. New Zealand doesn’t have a fully single payer system except for medical emergencies.

BUT the system in place is subsidized. We pay less in the walk-in minor emergency clinic here (with no insurance coverage) than we paid in co-pays in the US. Our payments for doctor’s visits at our regular GP clinic, with no government subsidy whatsoever, are half what we paid in co-pays in the US.

And all that without the $600 and change we were paying PER MONTH for insurance coverage for our family of four.

Oh, and labwork is practically free.

And don’t get me started on how joyous it is to live in a society where people don’t have that nagging fear of disaster. If you’re unemployed, there’s a benefit. When I first heard of it, I thought it was like the horrid system in the US where it’s manipulated so that you jump through ridiculous hoops to get as little as possible.

Ah, no. “The Benefit” or “WINZ,” as they say in Kiwiland, is for everyone who needs an income supplement. Everyone is taken care of in some way, however small, if they need it. Even recent migrants like us with only 3-year permits are eligible for something. We have not yet investigated it much but are considering a Working With Families benefit as my husband has had difficulty finding employment in this recession.

As for our current family income, I gross 43,000 per year in my very middle class job. I pay about 33% in income taxes. In the US I paid 25%.

The difference is , the amount I paid to insurance companies every month alone made any tax rate gains or losses or whatever a ridiculous joke.

That is why, for the first time, we can live on one middle class income quite comfortably. We have a little flat instead of the big house we had in Texas. We went from two cars to two bus passes. My husband has had difficulty getting a job and it has not impacted us in the least except for his personal frustration.

It’s that kind of freedom from fear, fear of job loss, of a medical crisis, or some other form of ruin that makes a society or culture as a whole so much happier and stress free.

Annnd 2:

Oh, and ANOTHER thing. My job in the US was medical social work. And unlike you, apparently, I saw plenty of people going without medical care because they couldn’t afford it and no insurance company would touch them for preexisting. Their choice was the emergency room or the free clinics. And they had to have an income check for those. So, well, sometimes not the free clinics.

These people, most with chronic conditions (I worked with neurology patients, HIV/AIDS, and the elderly), had to hope and pray that there was a programme somewhere with a grant that might, might, cover some of their healthcare. But often the programmes’ grants would cover ONLY a particular type of disorder. For instance, I had an HIV+ young man who got an tonsillitis. His only doctor was his HIV doctor through our programme. He worked for a company that offered health insurance, but, you know. Not for him. We stretched the diagnosis to the breaking point to try to find some connection to his HIV diagnosis so our programme could cover the cost. Couldn’t be done; wasn’t approved.

He didn’t have a “long wait for treatment” because there was no treatment. He couldn’t afford it. But, hey, uniondad and Sonny Bunch, at least he didn’t have to WAIT, huh?

And when dumbasses glorify the state of health care in the US because you spend oh so much money and have oh so many gadgets and your insurance companies show so much profit (scratch that one, it’s not money actually paid for health CARE, is it?), they don’t know that a lot of that money goes to private programme A and county programme B and state programme C and state programme D, all with their attendant paperwork and coverage rules and crap that takes whole offices of people to figure out, just to keep together the bodies and souls of the uninsured chronically ill for a few more years.

These programmes, which have to be coordinated for each patient according to income and circumstances (that’s where I came in), are the only thing keeping the American streets from being littered with the kind of body count that would be the result of “market driven health care.”

Poor people with tough but treatable health conditions have a far worse quality of life and die sooner. Full stop. Because we (wait, YOU) have this ridiculous, illogical, fuck the poor culture in the US. Trust me, what you sneeringly call “socialist utopian countries” have been shaking their heads at the capitalist dystopian countries like those in South America and South Africa and South Canada…whoops, I mean the US.