I was talking about if there was no welfare. I didn’t make that clear, sorry.
I don’t know. Maybe they have a pre-existing condition and can’t get insurance they can afford as a result. Maybe only one family member can work, and that person got hit by a car. Maybe, with the recession and all, they lost their job and insurance, and can’t find another job with coverage. Maybe their plan includes a huge deductible and they can’t afford to pay it. Maybe they had twins and it’s a bigger strain on the budget than they were anticipating.
Hey, I actually agree with you here. But you’re missing the point. Unless you can figure out some way to stop poor people from having kids (good luck), then what do you do with the kids that inevitably result? They don’t deserve to live in poverty, and they have a better chance of not being a drain on the system if we give them some help now. Whether or not they should have been born, they have been, and we have to deal with that. Again, it’s not perfect, but nothing is.
Again, nothing good comes from acting out of emotion. My position is two fold - number one, I personally do not want to be run into bankruptcy because hundreds of thousands of other people cannot be responsible for themselves. How much am I paying/going to pay to bail out people who don’t understand “if it seems to good to be true, it isn’t” who ran out and bought a house on a funky mortgage? Now you want me to pay to give them healthcare too?
Which leads us to number two - this has got to stop somewhere. We are becoming a nation of stupid children. Adults who vote, drive and have babies who don’t understand the dangers of living beyond their means, and then blame everyone but themselves when it all comes crashing down on their heads. Why do we keep supporting that?
You know there isn’t one answer to that. Which sick and starving children? Do they qualify for welfare and Medicaid? If not, why are they sick and starving? Do you actually know of any of these sick and starving children or are you just running with the rhetoric? Are these children suffering because their parents can’t get ahead or because their parents just don’t care?
So, once again, you are saying “let the children die to teach the parents a lesson”. Why are you denying that’s your position when you keep restating it? What else does your position amount to but “by helping the children we’re enabling the parents so we must not help them”?
There is welfare, so I’m not sure how that applies?
Do you? It seems that everything you say up there is an excuse for being irresponsible - why didn’t the person have insurance when the pre-existing condition was discovered? What happened to the car insurance when that other person got hit by a car? If they can’t afford the huge deductible then they aren’t going to get day to day doctors care, but they will get treated for serious problems. Maybe they should have decided they couldn’t afford another kid at all if twins stretches the budget that bad. The only thing I see up there as an honest to goodness “one of those things that happen” is losing a job and being unable to find another one for a long period of time. It’s for things like that we should have safety nets for, not for all the people that just blither thru life without a clue or a plan.
Why? Why is it that it is only the children that don’t “deserve” to live in poverty? Because you think they are cute? We should quit throwing money at them and use it to try to get their parents off of welfare and onto the tax rolls!
Except that hasn’t proven to be true. We throw billions of dollars a year at these children and they still live in poverty. Why would giving them free health care make any difference at all? It would just be one more thing they would expect to get for nothing and see no reason to strain themselves to earn.
See the post I just made on the subject. I know you all feel better about wringing your hands over da chyldren, but throwing money at them is obviously not working.
Besides, where did I ever say anything remotely like “let the children die”? We already have tons of programs spending billions of dollars to keep these kids alive, so that they can grow up to continue to drain the system. I’d just like to see it stop someplace, and universal health care seems like a good enough as any place to build a dam.
The children cannot be held responsible for their parents’ decisions. Nothing wrong with suggesting that some people shouldn’t have children, but what you’re advocating is punishing the children, not the adults.
Pretty damn likely, actually. You might be OK when you retire because it’s not far off, but twenty years down the line is a different story.
No. With pensions, once you’re getting the payouts you’re entitled to, other people have to earn the money that keeps those payments going.
The problem is that people are living much longer now, so pensions have to last a lot longer, meaning that they need a larger working population to support them. I don’t want the population to keep growing either, for environmental reasons, but pensions are going to suffer heavily.
Because the children are not responsible for their own poverty. There is no way that anything they did could have caused it.
Why should anyone have to earn the right to medical care? You shouldn’t have to, either.
Only because you are looking at it thru bias. You cannot see that continuing to throw money at poor people just because they have children isn’t particularly working?
You’ll have to specify how. I cannot see how, if the population stops growing or falls off by, say, 5%, it is going to make a significant effect on pensions. Particularly if the population deceleration is mostly among those who aren’t working. We currently have however many million it is people that are able to work minus however many hundreds of thousands of folks who aren’t working. If the population drops off a little bit, maybe some of those guys will get a job!
Huh, that would be nice - other people working to give me money. Of course, this is money that I have already earned…
That isn’t an answer. For some reason, people only want to support children and/or parents. No national hand wringing about singles, married folks who don’t have children, empty nesters. Children may not be able to be responsible about anything, but their parents are - why do we only reward those who are bringing even more lives into poverty? Why do we let those married without children, singles and old folks suffer while we still throw money at people who fail at birth control 101? The hand wringers only make excuses for the parents when some “disaster” happens to them - why is that? I mean, I know that it is the Cult of the Child these days, but if a caring society is supposed to provide safety nets for their people, why are we only doing it for parents?
At one time, the only guarantees in our country were life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. For some reason, in the last few decades, this has turned into everyone deserves everything. Well, there isn’t enough “everything” to go around, so you gotta earn it. Failing at birth control and creating dependents you can’t afford to take care of is not earning anything.
And where does it end? We have the ability these days to run up insane medicals bills to keep someone alive for six months, maybe with a good quality of life or maybe lying in a bed comatose. For the most part, insurance companies won’t let you do that because it isn’t a good way to spend finite resources. And when an insurance company does end up having to pay out a bunch of money on one person, it is almost always to a worker or a member of the worker’s family. You know, someone who contributed to society and earned all that care. Do you really want to give the right to that kind of care to someone who makes a living selling drugs or ripping off 7-11s?
Here’s an idea. Supposedly a vast majority of the voters in the US want UHC. Fine - you all get together and buy or build yourselves a huge policy, that covers anyone that wants to join in. Get back to me on how well it’s working in a couple of years, about how you have no trouble paying premiums so single women can have as many kids as they want, so gang bangers can get stitched up every other month, so drug addicts can go into rehab on a regular, revolving door, basis. It would be an interesting experiment.