Egalitarian Thug
Egalitarian Thug's JournalA million bankruptcies a year from medical costs, we are just one.
I thought I was retired in 2003. I had made a very good living for a couple of decades, almost any reasonable person would count me among the rich, and had socked away enough money to meet my rather modest needs for the rest of my life even if were to live to 100, or so I thought.
Even with the so-called great insurance I had, one major illness wiped me out. We lost our home, cars, savings, our future. On top of all this, I was one of the lucky ones. I had the means to find and get the good treatment that is available to those that can. Almost a decade earlier my mother was not one of those and she paid for her lack of wealth with her life.
She had insurance as well. She had the kind of insurance almost all of you that are lucky enough to have any, have. We didn't know that she had fallen into a system that is concerned with nothing except draining as much money as possible from sick people as they can before their victims die. We were all told, and we believed, that she was getting the care she needed. It wasn't until after her death that we learned the truth, the truth that she was dumped into the system that exists for the little people, that had we known and paid enough, she would probably be alive today.
So I am alive today. I am in my 50s, unhirable, over educated and overqualified, destined to live out whatever time remains doing the same menial jobs I did 30 years ago for less money than I made then. I have no insurance. I haven't had a checkup for six years, I haven't seen a dentist for nine. I very likely am sick again and for sure need to have my teeth looked after but we just can't afford it.
This is the great system that our President and our party has dumped all the rest of us into for the foreseeable future. This is the system that none of them will ever be victimized by. They will all get the very best treatment possible, the treatment that all of us are entitled to, for the rest of their lives. We get to pay for their futures with our lives.
Only from the short-sighted, doomed to fail perspective that dominates America today and
for the last 30 - 40 years or so.
Here's the thing. Just like every other non-botanical creature on earth, we are animals. We like to pretend that we are better than the other animals, but all the evidence is clear, we are just like them. We are ruled by uncontrollable and often unperceived impulses that regularly drive us to to take the worst actions, make the worst decisions, and behave in utterly irrational ways. We have several characteristics that seem to make us different or special, but in the end, we act no better (and often much worse) than any other animal.
One example; We have the capacity to understand that uncontrolled breeding will absolutely without fail lead to the devastation of our environment and ultimately our own demise, yet we breed like rabbits and then weep at the sight of starving children.
Smokers are addicts, I don't think there is any rational debate that this is so, but we like to pretend that it is a choice and therefore assign the blame to those that partake. The Obese eat too much and move too little, yet we claim that this too is beyond our control. Has anyone ever seen an obese person that lives in a famine stricken area? The very idea is ridiculous, but here in America obesity is due to genetics, a virus, a bad childhood, whatever we can make up to lay the cause on somebody/thing else. In fact, we have an entire industry devoted to nothing other than excusing our own lack of will that takes in more than enough money to end all hunger on earth.
And by this same lack of honest, objective consideration, we have a significant faction that fervently believes that denying help to those that need it will somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, make those people give up the cigarette and put down the fork and just get better.
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Gender: MaleCurrent location: Sin City, NV
Member since: Wed Mar 28, 2012, 06:11 PM
Number of posts: 12,448
