Posts
Is anyone listening to the real citizens of Canada, United Kingdom, France, and other nations who are being used as examples against healthcare reform in the U.S.? Yes, the real people who do not live in fear of bankruptcy if they get sick. The ones who only have the worry about getting better, and who have working hospitals and doctors that have all the technological advances and time to cure them.
Not the missionaries and other U.S. residents who have their tales of "when I was in X Country..."
People outside of America cannot fathom paying what we do for healthcare, and that all that money we pay in magically disappears when we are laid off without any notice. But that doesn't stop the GOP (with funding from the insurance companies) from spreading rumors about how horrible healthcare is outside of the U.S.
Twitter users in the UK have been criticizing America and the republicans for this nonsense. That's right, people in the UK are talking about how much they love their healthcare.
But what will you believe? The politically motivated, and lobbyist paid lies of the right-wingnuts? Or Stephen Hawking, who set the record straight? Wing-nuts have been claiming that government involvement in healthcare would kill people with severe handicaps, and those who are elderly and burdensome on the healthcare costs. Some even pointed to Stephen Hawking himself, who rebutted the notion, saying he is only alive today because of the UK's National Health Service.
Out of the 110,000 preventable deaths in the United States each year, that could have survived if they had access to proper healthcare, how many of those could be contributing members to the scientific community? How many could be entrepreneurs? More importantly, how many of them are mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, neighbors, friends to people that lost them before their time? Think about that, I'm sure there is someone in your family, amongst your friends, who cannot afford healthcare. Someone who cannot visit a doctor before things get too late, and their only choice is rushing into the emergency room at the last minutes of their life. How will it affect your family when someone is lost? Truth hurts. Ignoring it hurts even more.
I will give you an example. My mother works a full-time job and lives in Alabama. She doesn't make much money, but she has a college degree and owns her home (it's very small). When my sister turned 18, she was no longer eligible for the state's low-income health insurance option for kids. So, my mom took a second job to help pay for her individual insurance while she was in college. The result? She was then $56 over the monthly limit for the low-income plan, and she lost coverage on my little brother (age 16), too. She ended up having to pay for her company's group insurance at an exorbitant cost of several hundred dollars for a family. And since there is a waiting period to be reconsidered for the low-income plan, she is shit-out-of-luck. A plan like Obama's would guarantee coverage for both her (she finds it hard to afford even basic things like mammograms and annual exam) and her kids.
ReplyDelete