Yea, local Sheriff is a good friend an over half of his budget goes to paying medical. Most of which is people that got there selves locked up so they could get free dental.
As I said, I use to volunteer in EMS. I make about $700 a month an was spending around $300 of that on fuel for my truck to run medical calls. Most of those calls were people that made more money than me an did not have an emergency but calling 911 cause it was free an they would call for a runny nose as act like I owed them something.
No one in my family is wealthy. I think my brother brings home about $32K so he is our high mark. I see people fighting to get medical every day so I understand... But Socialism is not the fix.
You're absolutely right, Socialism is
NOT the fix! The big problem here is that socialism is a theoretical form of
government, or "political system of communal ownership in which the means of production and distribution are controlled by the people, and operated according to equity and fairness rather than market principles."
-Encarta World Dictionary We are a capitalist democracy, nothing and no-one will change that.
We've been discussing
socialized medicine, or
nationalized healthcare if that sounds better. We already have it in Medicare and Medicaid. Congress has their own special, bang-up type!
Nobody hoots or hollers over having 'socialized' police and fire protection, do they? The fire chief doesn't show up when your house is on fire and ask " Will this be Visa or Mastercharge?" The police don't verify your income and turn you down because "Unless you can pay us in cash up front we just can't check out that prowler."
Rebelcowboy, I commend you on your 13 years of volunteering in emergency response. That shows real dedication! Volunteers are truly needed to serve in many areas that wouldn't have any coverage otherwise. Just this morning we heard on the radio that in our own county, a womans son fell off of his horse and was severely injured. When she called a nearby town for an ambulance, she was told ther were none available. She pressed them, "Until when?" The response was "No ambulances available to the western half of the county." Apparently she was an EMT with some volunteer fire dept. so she called a Life Flight chopper in herself! The radio said she knew how to prepare the scene for them, etc.
As I have said, I surely don't claim to have the answers, but I think the way this system works stinks! Why should a millionaire get better medical care than an elderly grandmother on Social Security? Do we assign value to a person by their humanity or their wealth? Is one just as much a person as the other? There's nothing wrong with money, but without our humanity, we're nothing more than pigs in the mud.
Oh, and about Pfizer. According to Fortune 500, just so far this year they have made a
profit of over
10 BILLION DOLLARS ! That's up 21.2% over 2010, and the year isn't even over yet. Some research showed that Pfizer made $180 billion on just 4 drugs, but settled fraud charges with the Dept. of Justice over them for $2.3 billion. Still a tidy profit for something that they were pushing
fraudulantly!
So obviously, this is a complex issue, and we won't settle it here. It is good to discuss various viewpoints. For myself, I will not lose sleep over whether Big Pharma makes another billion or not. I do lose sleep worrying about those that some call "the less fortunate" among us. I was brought up to care for the poor and downtrodden. There seems to be more and more rhetoric these days to make them a little 'less than human'. History has taught us the dangers of thinking like that, I hope.
~S
