It's become quite obvious over the last several weeks that the mouth foaming that emanates from the right about the president's policies, as well as the federal government in general, is continuing to reach heretofore unseen depths of hypocrisy. A shining example of this is the states that continually vote Republican actually receive the most federal aid and tax dollars from the states that vote for Democrats.
But this one really takes the cake.
Plaintiff challenging healthcare law went bankrupt – with unpaid medical bills
Mary Brown, a 56-year-old Florida woman who owned a small auto repair shop but had no health insurance, became the lead plaintiff challenging President Obama's healthcare law because she was passionate about the issue.
Brown "doesn't have insurance. She doesn't want to pay for it. And she doesn't want the government to tell her she has to have it," said Karen Harned, a lawyer for the National Federation of Independent Business. Brown is a plaintiff in the federation's case, which the Supreme Court plans to hear later this month.
But court records reveal that Brown and her husband filed for bankruptcy last fall with $4,500 in unpaid medical bills. Those bills could change Brown from a symbol of proud independence into an example of exactly the problem the healthcare law was intended to address.
This would be funny if it weren't so tragic. The willful ignorance here is simply astounding.
The truly frustrating part is that we all still end up paying for her anyway, as Wendell Potter, former Vice President of corporate communications at CIGNA, recently noted...
Somebody has to pay for it. And guess who that is? It is all of us. Even Mary Brown. She and the rest of us cover that uncompensated care either through higher taxes to support the Medicare and Medicaid programs or through higher health insurance premiums. The care that presumably is "absorbed" by the hospitals is, in reality, being absorbed not by those facilities but by us. This is what the term "cost shifting" is all about.
And this irrational way of paying for that so-called uncompensated care has us locked into a dysfunctional system in which costs for both the insured and the uninsured keep spiraling upward.
That's right, adolescent whiners, and that's why the PPACA is the best option at present. Scream all you want about it but simple and neat solutions to complex problems like health care don't fucking exist. Everything is not going to be perfect and we're just going to have to live with it...a truly hard thing to swallow for many people.
But, hey, at least those adolescents on the right will always have something to bitch about because it won't be perfect so that counts for something, hmm?
3 comments:
Well you may actually be learning something inspite of yourself. This is all about shifting cost. Not reducing cost - just making someone else pay. You usually aren't that honest about it.
It's a good thing there are Fatcats who stole all the money. They can pay for it. Anybody who has an extra dollar only got it by stealing it from the poor workingmen of the world. It is only 'fair' to take other people's money... if they aren't using it the way you would.
Your logic is so impeccable we should be able to expand it to other things that people declare bankrupt.
Things like car loans, mortgages, credit cards.
Perhaps we should have a central federal program that would receive monies from the people and equally distribute it in order for people to buy cars, homes and big screen tv's.
That way all the people would be able to exercise their rights to, well whatever, and the cost shifting by those big nasty corporations wouldn't price us all out of a new car.
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