Have you read this article on the NYTimes front page? Wait, before you do, make sure you have Kleenex or can control your outrage.
This is completely unacceptable. Our healthcare system in America in 2013 reminds me of the stories that my grandfather told me about the pesthouse his mother died in back in 1920.
There is simply no good excuse to treat anybody this badly. If you are a Republican supporting this level of cruelty and heartlessness, you should be ashamed to call yourself a Christian. People are dying from untreated illnesses they couldn’t afford to pay for before Obamacare and because of Obamacare, they will have no access to some of the only charity hospitals that will still accept them.
All because some toilet paper magnates would rather spend hundreds of millions of dollars paying bullies to spread lies and deception than pay their damn taxes.
It’s horrible.
And people with company paid health insurance shouldn’t get comfy. The bad guys have already done away with pensions. It’s only a matter of time before the medical benefits face the music.
You do not want to end up like the patients in this article.
Filed under: General | Tagged: cancer patients, Medicaid, Memorial hospital, Obamacare |
The Confluence 
I read the article. I’m still trying to figure out why this is the Republicans’ fault. I recently took my grandson to the circus. While we were waiting in line to get in, a clown handed him a “circus toy”, which delighted him. Then the clown turned to me and said, “That will be $10 ma’am.” I returned the toy to the clown, which upset my grandson. Who’s fault was it that he was upset? The clown who gave him a “gift” with financial strings attached? Or the nasty, bad grandmother who needed to spend her $10 on something else? When the federal government mandates a state to provide something, the federal government needs to pay for it – in full, into perpetuity. They try to do the same thing with education bills. They vote for something and then stick states. cities, and towns with the invoice. The Democrats own this mess. They decided they could remove the subsidies to hospitals that treat the indigent because their “health care” law was going to be so awesome everyone would run to sign-up, and they needed to sell the idea ObamaCare was going to save money. If you make a mess, and I refuse to help you clean it up, it’s still your mess.
Have you no decency??
We are talking about working people with cancer who can’t get medicaid or health insurance subsidies. They put off treatment because they can’t afford the thousands of dollars in diagnostic treatments.
The other developed countries of the world don’t let these people die but it seems to be perfectly ok with you that they do so because you might need $10 for something?
You know damn well that I was not a supporter of Obamacare because it didn’t go far enough. It is a Republican plan as put forward by the Heritage Foundation back in the 90s.
Your attitude, smugness and so-called morality disgusts me. I have seen people with insurance die from cancer and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. But you seem to be ok with it.
You need to grow a heart.
You don’t need a heart to support welfare for the common citizens.
You just need a functioning brain.
Smart people who aren’t rich support the welfare state because they realize they might need it some day, even if they don’t need it now.
Smart people who ARE rich support the welfare state because it’s much cheaper–not to mention SAFER–to take care of the unlucky folks now, than to wait until gross inequalities provoke rebellion, and then trying to put it down–and maybe failing to put it down.
By the way, I’ve had about enough of you coming here and dumping your classless comments on my pages. You’re an ignorant, ill-informed, immoral person who should be shunned by nice people.
I don’t know you personally but my image of you isn’t very good right now. I’d probably cross the street to avoid you and stay away from you at parties. No, I don’t want to meet you or get to know you and don’t think you are anything special.
The fact that you post here indicates you think your opinion matters to me.
It doesn’t. You’re the worst kind of human.
But if the Democrats agree fast enough to repeal Obamacare and go back to status quo ante in time to prevent all the permanent damage Obamacare was written to cause, why wouldn’t the Republicans help repeal Obamacare if they were really against it oh so much? Or were they really just pretending, secure in the knowledge that they could get credit for “opposing” it while secure in the knowledge that the Democrats would pass the Republicans’ own plan regardless?
Or is dancing on peoples’ graves more important to you than helping remove something you realize is a problem if the engineers of that problem are willing to help you help them remove it? Or do you just pretend to oppose the problem so you can make fun of the people who engineered the problem for everyone and not just their own Party?
And exactly what alternative have the republicans come up with regarding the health care problem in our country?
Nothing, zero, nada…
Just like you, plenty of ranting; but cozing and bedding with big bucks fat cats Insurance bitchness.
The Usual Gang Of Idiots over at the Freshwater Crustacean Pit have no better answer to disgusting inequalities than “Mammon giveth, and Mammon taketh away; blessed be the name of Mammon.”
Either that, or “Make the pie bigger, so everyone can have more”–ignoring the grim fact that Mommie Dearest Nature isn’t going to allow much more of that strategy for much longer.
As for the Koch brothers and their fellow robber barons (I assume those are the people RD meant), I guess they think their public and private security agencies can squelch any revolution before it could trouble them.
The members of the Bourbon and Czarist aristocracies, and for that matter, of the Soviet nomenklatura, thought the same thing.
The hardline aristocrats, such as the Koch brothers, forget that the welfare state for the common citizen (as distinct from welfare for the rich, aka “crony capitalism”) was not set up out of misguided compassion, or out of compassion of any sort. It was set up to keep the masses of various countries from emulating the Jacobins (and later, the Bolsheviks).
“…ashamed to call yourself a Christian.”? Ashamed to call yourself a human, perhaps.
Seriously, Who the hell do these people think they are? We shouldn’t be associating with such lowlifes.
By the way, did I know you at the big orange? Did you use to eat up all the smoked salmon at my online cocktail parties?
I never hogged the smoked salmon; but I did tell you about setting up a VPN so you could watch the British olympics.
RD – I actually know people who have died of cancer (and one who is on her last 6 months) because they did not have insurance. They worked minimum wage jobs and barely got by – the employer did not offer insurance and so the diagnostics were not done until it was too late. Once the stage IV tumor is obvious, medicare will provide palliative care until they die. Nice. The future working poor will have to pay for obamacare and then still not be able to afford diagnostics.
In one case, the “employer” is a daycare center. I think daycare jobs are supposed to be done by wives covered by husband’s insurance, right? Otherwise nobody could afford childcare if they had to pay the actual cost of employee benefits and wages.
I honestly can’t believe anyone could think that people who take low paying jobs (which are needed by society) DESERVE to die of treatable illness as punishment for not getting a trade or college education or HUSBAND to provide for them. I really am trying to understand how “we” became so thrilled by the chance to have people who are poor punished beyond the usual shame and near starvation.
Some of those without insurance were waiting to become eligible for Medicare years down the line. Yes, they were middle aged women.
Oh, right. Because if a woman is married to an “older man”, they can’t be covered by medicare when he becomes eligible. Unless she is employed in the type of job where she has health coverage.
Jesus, is that true? I’m screwed/
Hey Sweet Sue!
My understanding about the way that (doesn’t) work is if you are covered by your husband’s health plan and then he qualifies for medicare before you. You will have to be covered by a private plan until you are old enough to qualify for medicare. Wives who never worked are sometimes caught in a bad place because husband may need to retire before wife qualifies for medicare. I’m not sure how retiree insurance works or if it fills that gap.
I’ve known several women who worked as receptionists for a few years to get medical coverage after husband retired until they were old enough for medicare.
Yes, the Democrats destroyed this system too. It’s yet another casualty of their horrifying law. Really? The constitutional law guy and his friends thought they could force Medicaid on these red state ideologues without push-back? And they didn’t have a contingency plan?
And the Republicans don’t care, never did, probably think it is a plus. They won’t lift a hand to fix it, at least to restore the federal DSH funding if they don’t want to accept having states pay the 10% for the additional Medicaid recipients. Nope, they’re getting out of the way, throwing those Democrat an anvil to destroy them and giggling. This is all about a game that they’re winning. And to add insult to injury, they’re saying, see???? — “socialism” doesn’t work.
The loss of DSH aid is going to affect the hospitals that are shut out of the individual insurance market too via the narrow networks, because they’re going to lose insurance payments. It’s going to drastically reduce the ability to care for sickest patients.
I blame Democrats first. This law is a horrifyingly poorly thought out, TRAGIC mess. But Republicans could have some compassion for a change and help.
The zillionaires in Washington and their supporters should be writing checks to these hospitals. How do they sleep at night? Oh, yeah, with sociopathic wet dreams about how much money they’re going to make from all of their sweet deals that give away the store for the rich.
Letting these people die is a good thing, frankly for both groups of party elite. The sooner “the po-” die, the better. It means govt can spend Medicare and Medicaid dollars on something else like crony payoffs.
But for we humans? It should be a reason to demonstrate.
Florida might be the worst. The Republican Governor, Rick Scott, was under pressure from local hospitals was for taking Medicaid but the Republican legislature balked.
I have to agree. The Democrats had a window of power to work for a genuine improvement plan and they conspired to prevent any improvement from being discussed, including Baucus going as far as to have Physicians For Single Payer arrested at his early hearings to prevent them from bringing that choice up on camera.
Obama and his Catfood Democrats deliberately wrote the law and the regs to profitise charity hospitals or shut them down altogether. It is the Democrats’ Republican plan now. (Which is why the Republicans will never repeal it and why any challenges to it that reach the Catfood Roberts Court will be struck down). So we will have to figure out how to purge or replace the Democratic Party before we have any chance at replacing Obamacare with something better. Or even back to what we had before if that possibility isn’t erased along with everything Obamacare touches. After all, charity hospitals would be better than no charity hospitals and how do we re-charitise a privatised profitised hospital?
And now, even the typical advocacy groups are in the tank. They can’t come to bat for these people. They can’t say, WTF did you do and when are you going to fix this Democrats, because that would “hurt the party.” That would go against the notion of this law as a basket of hope and change ponies and rainbows.
Well, just as the truth came out about web site catastrophe even with the Democrats best efforts to keep it quiet, the truth will come out about this far more catastrophic situation.
Anyway, I’m spamming your blog. I need to go walk or something.
And I will say, Medicaid, at best, doesn’t exactly deliver quality care for either cancer or mental health patients. Both will die a whole lot faster.
What we needed was true national health care — CARE, not “medical insurance”.
I have to disagree with you about Medicaid and cancer care, at least pediatric oncology. My daughter is a pediatric cancer survivior, she spent years in treatment and I had the opportunity to see and learn a lot. In our case Medicaid paid for tests and other things our private insurance wouldn’t cover.
Most of the kids also had the federal CHIP program which was pretty much automatic with diagnosis in addition to Medicaid so perhaps that was the difference??? There were also a host of charities lined up to help any family with an income of a certain amount or less.
Bottom line the Medicaid pediatric patients received the same care and in some cases better care than my own child. If there was disparity it went in the opposite direction of what you implied. Once again things could be completely different in the adult oncology world, I’m speaking only of pediatric oncology.
The sub-article on the NY Times web site below your article is about the WH in “crisis mode”. Just infuriating. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/09/us/politics/a-white-house-in-crisis-mode-but-some-allies-prod-for-more.html
A quote:
“If I had known,” Mr. Obama said, according to the aide, “we could have delayed the website.”
No, Mr. Poor Excuse for a human being Obama, you couldn’t delay the web site. You’ve ensured that even quality plans (which most of the cancelled plans were) have to be dropped. People who are sick HAVE to have a way to enroll in your cheesy piece of crap plans so they can get some care. People have to have a way, even a stumbling way, to enroll, even for the lousy crap care they’ll get with your narrow network plans.
Your job was to get things right, not to duck and cover if things happen to go wrong.
It’s not about YOU, Mr. President. Or YOUR crisis.
You think YOU’RE in crisis? Ask that cancer patient who is losing their doctors because of your lousy plans. Or have you and the good Democratic party loyals on the blogs bashed those folks to death already now?
Even if this situation leads to Obama’s resignation, he’ll go away and enjoy a rich and successful retirement. But those who he has harmed will go away and some will literally die.
Failed us or kept promises to their Wall Street contributors?
The print and broadcast news media is what failed us by not informing the public of how health care is delivered in other civilized industrialized countries except for the few failures that occur in any system.
The question,”How can you sleep at night” is wasted on Banksters as they have no morals. Ask it of the likes of a Maureen Dowd or a Chris Matthews, two who helped get us here.
A tidbit, when Hillary was authoring Big Dog Care she had the Big Three automakers on board. There liked the idea of getting out from under the costs of administering health benefits … until they realized that UAW workers would have health benefits during a strike. They thought it would be cheaper to pay benefits not realizing the coming inflationary jump in costs.
This is why labor in the E U has a bigger voice. they can shut the country down with a national strike and still get health care. something the Willards of Wall Street fear and will do anything to keep American workers i the dark about. With Obama’s help.
The question,”How can you sleep at night” is wasted on Banksters as they have no morals. Ask it of the likes of a Maureen Dowd or a Chris Matthews, two who helped get us here
You are right, of course, Mr. Mike, but RD was asking this of someone who used to post here, regularly. Most, definitely, not a bankster, and a woman, too boot
My reverse sexism is showing.
[…] from the Id, on November 10, 2013 at 3:35 pm […]
No, Chief of the Crustaceans, I don’t think you don’t actively support “Greed is good”.
However, I do think you passively support it by accepting the decades of lavishly-financed corporate elite propaganda which drones over and over again that nothing better than a “Greed Is Good” society is possible, because the only alternatives are nasty systems like Communism or religious fanaticism, ignoring the Western democracies which have made the social insurance state work fairly well.
I don’t want a revolution any more than you do, since I doubt I would survive one. However, how long do you think the burgeoning masses of permanently insecure–and heavily armed–USAmericans will accept growing poverty without rebellion, when they find that no amount of diligent labor will lift them out of poverty, and the political system is so rigged that they can’t change things at the polls?
*sigh* One too many “don’ts” in the first sentence.
I can haz edit function, plz? 😛
If I got up from my desk right now, I could walk to Grady hospital in 15 minutes. This could not be more personal.