Okay, looks like I get to eat a little crow here. It turns out upon re-reading the article that the government never was on the hook for Diana Smith’s operation after all. It appears she raised the money to pay for it herself, through the efforts of her friends and members of her local community. The snag is that when the government denied her Medicaid coverage, the hospital would no longer agree to perform the operation out of liability concerns, concerns that would have been protected by Smith’s Medicaid coverage.
Clearly that yanks the rug out from under my impression that the government deliberately tricked her into losing coverage so as to avoid paying for her operation, so you are all free to engage in high fives and happy dances and fist-bumping or whatever it is you do when you get to gloat over an opponent having been wrong.
taps foot, allows sufficient time for celebratory gloating
But, we’re still left with the fact that once Diana Smith began to receive additional benefits by virtue of her son having become eligible for disability payments, the response of the government upon learning of the problem and the fact that government benefits themselves were what was causing the problem, turned a deaf ear to her complaints and life-threatening situation, telling her it was “too late”, nothing could be done, and leaving her to die when all it would have taken to correct the situation would have been for someone to take the bull by the horns and arrange to have her son’s benefits rescinded (and no, that’s not what I wanted in the first place :rolleyes:) and her Medicaid coverage reinstated.
The very fact that the response of the government was what it was, particularly in light of the extremely precarious and life-threatening situation she was in and the relatively minor steps it would have taken in order to save her life, points out just as clearly the reasons I and others do not want our health care placed in the hands of the U.S. government. It is bureaucratic and hidebound, bogged down in red tape, and administered by lackeys of the sort who would tell a woman in her situation that nothing could be done, it was “too late”.
Fortunately, as elucidator said, erasers exist and the mistake is being corrected. One can only wonder what would have happened had she and her son not been so photogenic and the erasers not been named WFOR in Ft. Lauderdale, State Sen. Dave Aronberg, and, as it turns out, Rush Limbaugh. I’m guessing she would have been left to die by the very same bureaucratic indifference that Sarah Palin has in mind when she talks about death panels.
So while the accusation of government trickery is withdrawn with my apologies, the larger, overriding complaint - that of a government indifferently allowing one of its citizens to die simply because she happened to fall through one of the cracks created by its own red tape and intractability - still stands as an excellent illustration of why so many of us on the right do not want the U.S. government dictating the terms of health care for ourselves and our families.
Hardly. Ask Blalron how much constructive criticism and how many solutions he has proposed regarding the concerns of this country’s conservatives.
The phrase “They can dish it out but they can’t take it” seems almost to have been coined specifically for application to this board. If you’ll allow me to mix a metaphor, the complaining and criticizing of the left I engage in is but a drop in the bucket compared to wind of left-wing hate that blows toward anything conservative around here.
Yeah. Right. :rolleyes:
(And so now you see why I explain myself when I have to leave for a while. Douchebags like this guy try to pretend I’ve been “scared off” if I don’t.)