Lots of people are interested in casting aspersions on anyone who takes benefits, it seems.
That’s the free market for ya; if private industry isn’t interested, then it is not important.
First of all, it’s not 3% of the population, it’s more like 15%, or 40 million souls. That qualifies as an issue of public concern in my book.
But that aside, you are losing sight of the big picture.
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Every human being who’s not a multi-millionaire faces a non-negligible possibility–no matter how careful they are with their health and personal finances–of some day developing a treatable medical issue that they 1) cannot afford to treat and which 2) if untreated, will subject them to suffering and/or premature death.
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In order to avoid having to choose between 1) defaulting on medical debts or 2) submitting to unnecessary suffering/premature death, responsible, upstanding people will seek to purchase… health insurance! Problem solved, right?
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Unfortunately, not everyone is responsible enough to buy health insurance before they actually need it, and that ends up having serious negative external consequences for people who are responsible and trying to buy it long before they actually need it.
The problem is, left to their own druthers, a great many people would only buy health insurance when they really need it. When health carriers catch on, they realize they have to raise premiums. But this reduces demand among everyone except those who need the coverage most, leading to further adverse selection. This “death spiral” ends up creating a market where, whoop-dee-doo, health insurance is unaffordable because it’s pricing in terrible adverse selection. Irresponsible people create a dynamic that makes it impossible for responsible people to buy themselves good health insurance.
- In that state of affairs, the only affordable policies available are either 1) policies that don’t offer comprehensive benefits of the sort a responsible person prepared for all contingencies would want to own, or 2) policies being sold to young people with verifiably flawless health records.
In other words, you have a market where responsible, self-sufficient individuals cannot afford to buy health insurance because an affordable product isn’t available on the market. And there is absolutely nothing the free market will do to correct that situation, because health carriers can’t force people to buy their product. The work-around is that employers force you to buy health insurance, which eliminates from the carrier perspective the risk of adverse selection from people at your particular company.
That’s the problem that the ACA seeks to address. It does so by saying, “You know what? The only way the health insurance market will work is if you eliminate adverse selection, which you do by making sure everyone buys it.” You may not agree that the lack of a functioning individual health insurance market is a big deal. Or you may not agree that the government should be the one to fix it. But that’s “why we did any of this.”
Bleeding hearts don’t like it when they are told the people they are helping are irresponsible layabouts.
What does private industry have to do with it?
Thank you for your candid answer. So, you don’t know what percentage of people receiving welfare benefits are just blithering through life expecting a handout and a free ride, and how many are people who could legitimately be described as deserving of some kind of charity and societal support. I don’t know either. But considering the relatively small amounts of money involved in the scheme of the budget, I’m willing to extend them the benefit of the doubt in the absence of better information. I would rather let a guilty person go free than wrongly condemn an innocent one, in other words.
Cite:
Since entitlements are about half the federal budget, that equates to about 5% of the federal budget being spent on the non-working poor. You’re welcome to take a stab at how many non-working poor also should qualify as non-deserving, and how you propose to separate those people from the rest without creating a massive new intrusive bureaucracy.
If they don’t fund surveys, then it is not important.
Bleeding hearts can read statistics and are smart enough to remain unmoved by anecdotal stories because we know that the plural of anecdote is not data.
We’re smart enough to be able to look up welfare statistics show that welfare fraud is rare and when committed usually mistakes made by businesses or the agencies providing the assistance (we realize that the “Welfare Queen” is a myth). For an overwhelming number of recipients, it is temporary (and it has to be since there are time limits on everything but lifetime disability claims and in most states you have to actually do a lot of work to show you are looking for work or taking classes to get into a better job or field in order to simply receive benefits) and that even the maximum benefits are a pittance.
Also, we’re compassionate enough to decide that we’d rather a few people job the system than kids go to bed hungry. Whereas conservatives would rather destroy the system and to hell with the people who need it than have anyone get something they don’t feel that they “deserve.”
You’ve admitted that you don’t know how many are “irresponsible layouts”, and yet you are content to cast aspersions on them just the same.
Ok, I’ll bite. Are you trolling again, or just genuinely ignorant?
So you are entitled to fire protection by virtue of your paying taxes, but paying taxes doesn’t entitle me to my subsidy without jumping through more of your hoops?
Perhaps we should apply that same standard to leaches like you who didn’t plan ahead for your own disability support.
You just keep moving the goalposts to your own advantage, and to spite those you don’t approve of.
Which will always happen no matter how things are set up. What I am addressing is the prevailing belief that everyone (or close to it) who gets public assistance only needs a hand up, and is in need thru no fault of their own. This makes it easy to game the system and be irresponsible.
I note in your site that the definition of working household appears to be one person working at least 1000 hrs a year, which works out to just under 20 hrs a week. If you are talking about a single person living on that, maybe they legitimately would need help, but since the word “household” was used I’d say it’s safe to assume we are talking more than one person. If there are other adults, why aren’t they working? If there are kids, why did they have them when working so few hours?
Just because someone in a household is working doesn’t mean they aren’t just blithering thru life looking for someone else to take care of them. They don’t even need to be what most folks consider poor - there are people living across the street from me in a $400,000 house whose kids were getting free lunches at school, and three of the five adults living there have jobs, apparently full time ones judging by how long they are away from home each day.
Statistics are worthless unless you know the exact criteria that was used to gather them. See above re: “working households”.
And yet, it’s even been cited here that what the stats say is that it is rare to find and/or prove welfare fraud. Which of course is a big difference. Not that I’ve said anything about fraud.
And there is your problem right there - won’t someone think of the children. Sob sob. You would rather feel good about yourself because you gave so a kid could grow up in poverty than address the underlying problems.
I don’t have to know how many are irresponsible to cast aspersions on the ones that I that I do know are. Anecdotes may not be data, but when I personally know scores of people who have made irresponsible choices and expected help when it came back to bite them, it creates suspicion towards all.
Snort. As I said waaay back there, the fire dept and Obamacare are nothing the same. We have fire, police, etc for the community good. We have Obamacare because people couldn’t be arsed to buy health insurance.
What makes you think I didn’t? I’ve been “officially” disabled for over 20 years, and aware it was a probability far longer than that. Are you saying I don’t have a right to take the pension funds the government made me invest? Social Security is not public assistance, no matter what you want to believe. And lord knows, I am not living on my SSDI.
No, you are just making asinine assumptions that don’t hold up to the light of day. Like equating the fire department and public assistance, or assuming I’m what? living on SSDI? Didn’t plan ahead for when I wouldn’t be able to work?
Why couldn’t people be arsed to buy fire insurance? They should pull themselves up by their burning bootstraps!
Are you really that dumb? The fire department is not there to make sure you don’t lose anything in a fire, they are there to try to save your house and to see that the fire doesn’t spread. They aren’t there for individual structures, there are there to stop fires.
And, responsible people do have fire insurance.
Which federal or state investigation has found Chris Christie responsible for Bridgegate?
I asked mhendo for a clarification. Maybe you should consider biting him?
That is news to the ones that managed SS in the USA.
Ah. So both trolling and ignorant. Bravo.
So you’re saying you dismiss statistics when they do not comport with your predetermined outcome? Because you really need to show some reason why the methodology for determining welfare fraud is erroneous.
Why just last month, the USDA updated a report that pointed out where fraud and abuse was happening and the steps they were taking to prevent it. Kindly tell me what is wrong with this report.
If that’s what you think has been said, you’re wrong. If that’s what was said, whoever said it is wrong.
Fraud and abuse is detectable and correctable. You can even anonymously report welfare fraud through the internet if you find it.
If someone is getting something they don’t deserve, it would be fraudulent, wouldn’t it? Words have meanings you know. Either someone deserves their benefits or they are recieving them fraudulently.
How do kids grow up if they are unable to eat? How does not having kids eat address the underlying problem? What should the government do about the underlying problem? Isn’t it possible to do something about the underlying problem while feeding the kids who are hungry now?
Your anecdotes are irrelevant.
Your anecdotes are still irrelevant.
And what’s all that about “addressing the underlying problem”? The “solutions” I’ve seen from the right side of the aisle have tended to boil down to either “cut taxes on the rich, and the poor will get some eventually” (or “because freedom is more important than saving the lives of a bunch of poor people”) or “not my problem.”