Tag Archives: health care

Why?

Well…not going to talk about the WH idiot today…as I’ve said, I need to talk about other things to keep my sanity…what little there is of it…intact…over the past couple of months after going out to Kos a few times a day, I’ve noticed a couple of things…first, even with the pie fights that erupt sometimes over politics, there are a lot of really nice people that hang out there and the mood is normally pretty upbeat with the overriding theme that we can make the world a better place by staying true to progressive values, supporting a science and fact based world, and looking for and valuing the truth in our daily discourse. One thing that has alarmed me some is the almost daily fundraising that is necessary to keep our fellow members from homelessness and medical bankruptcy…and my question is why? In a country as rich as ours, why the hell can’t we take care of everyone’s health like almost every other first world country does? Just today, there was a couple at Kos that were running a fundraiser to get to the 1,500 dollars they needed for copays so that one of them could go for cancer treatment…let that sink in…there are many people who don’t have the money to save their lives because medical care is not covered…just like the woman here in GR who was turned away from a life saving heart transplant and told that she needed to go out and fund raise the 15K to get the process started before the hospital would do anything…that is just one the most sick things I have ever heard…we have trillions to give away to the rich and corporations but people who are months away from dying without proper medical care are told they are on their own and need to come up with cash before they can be saved. I lived that life for 16 years before Medicare kicked in…there was not one day that the small pain in my chest didn’t trigger dread in my mind that I was going to end up in the hospital and lose every thing I worked my entire life for just because health insurance was too expensive for me to afford…and the stress was there every day, wondering if there was some chronic disease like cancer or heart disease that was building up and just waiting to attack…something that could have been so much less serious if it would have been caught in the early stages by preventive care that I couldn’t afford. Why? I worked my whole life until our rotten society deemed that I was no longer worth a job just because I had gotten older…and corporations were allowed  or even encouraged to discriminate against mature workers by chasing every dime of profit for the owner class while wages stagnated and everyone else kept going backwards. Again, I ask why? Even now, with moving to a Medicare advantage plan, I am still on the hook for 4,000 dollars a year if anything happens to put me in the hospital…right now, I can afford that, but that is almost 20% of what I get from SS every year and if that happens, I can see having to make some hard decisions like do I eat or pay my bills…and, no one should have to make those decisions after a lifetime of hard work and education….