I’m not familiar with your personal situation, but if your lack of health care is because you choose not to purchase insurance, then why is that my problem (I apologize in advance if that is not the case).
If you honestly believe that most people are without health care because we CHOOSE not to purchase insurance, you are extremely fucking deluded.
It is your problem because people who ‘choose’ not to buy health insurance either get health care under false pretenses (they lie about the ability to pay for it, then default) or they show up at the emergency room where they cannot be turned away. Either way you pay for it, in higher medical costs and higher insurance premiums. Your notion that people who ‘choose’ not to pay for insurance are simply going to go home and die silently in the dark is naive. The tighter you hold on to your money, the easier it makes it for them to take it. Pay now or pay later, it makes no difference, you don’t get to keep it.
At the same time, I see many gainfully employed do just that.
Just because one is employed doesn’t mean one can afford insurance. Or that the coverage offered is worth shit. I could have gotten some kind of health care when I was working at Kmart, only after I read through the literature, I saw it wouldn’t cover jackshit.
I’ve never said anything of the like.
I do have a problem with gainfully employed ppl that CHOOSE not to purchase insurance, receive health care at the emergency room and once again CHOOSE not to pay for it. Does it drive the cost up for the ppl who are paying, absolutely. Should we convert to socialized medicine because of a bunch of deadbeats - I don’t think so. That may sound cold hearted, but they rolled the dice - they should accept the consequences. But that would require personal responsibility - something of which this country is extremely lacking.
So instead, you’re happy to go without, and leech off the rest of us, is that it?
Really? Then what do you propose the working poor who cannot afford insurance are supposed to do when they have a catastrophic illness? Pray?
What are you going to do about it? You just bitch & moan, and in the mean time they pick your pocket, and you are powerless to prevent it. So why not put that money toward socialized medicine? It is just the ‘something for nothing’ part that offends your conservative principles, isn’t it? Those principles are costing you a lot of money, bub.
Maybe we’d rather pay a little more to keep our level of healthcare where it is than to convert to socialized medicine and reduce our quality of healthcare to that of all the freeloaders.
Cold hearted? Mean? maybe, but also maybe deserved.
You know, that’s the second time you’ve made that argument in this thread, and I’m just not buying it. Give them medical insurance, or they’re going to steal from me?
That’s a non-starter, right there.
Look around, they’re already stealing from you, and there is nothing you can do about it except rant and rave. You have given them no choice but to steal from you, or die. Not a difficult choice.
Viva la revolucion!
Keep it where it is? In your dreams. Health care is rising faster than any other segment of the economy except perhaps energy, and you think you can keep it where it is?
Short-sighted is what I would call it. It is an out of control spiral that throws more and more people out of the health insurance system and into the emergency rooms and medical bankruptcy. You are willing to continue playing this shell game indefinitely just to make sure somebody doesn’t get something for nothing?
Are there no workhouses? Are there no orphanages?
The simple fact is that when people don’t have health insurance, the emergency room is their doctor’s office. And you pay for it through taxes anyway. The problem with that is that by the time they get to the emergency room, the simple disorder they could have had taken care of relatively cheaply has usually blossomed into something more complex that requires more expensive care.
Of course, your solution is probably to stop requiring ERs to treat everyone who needs it and just let them die in the parking lot if they can’t afford it, so that argument is most likely falling on deaf ears.
And it will be won without firing a shot because you refuse to do anything to prevent it.
bring back debtor’s prison for those who won’t at least perform community service in lieu of paying their bills.
People should pay for their own healthcare. What could be more simple than that?
bingo
Oh my, ideological college students are cute, aren’t they?
Jesus Christ…didn’t anyone tell you folks that Ebenezer Scrooge, pre-ghost, was NOT being held up as a paragon of virtue to be emulated?