Thoughts
I was wondering where in the Obamacare law people were exempted from the mandate if they lived in one of the many parts of the US where there is no health care. Why require people to spend money on something that is impossible for them to use.
Maybe it would have been a better idea to see what could be done about making health care available before you decided to make it ‘Affordable’. The same goes for signing up on the Internet or over the phone – that presupposed the availability of Internet and/or phone service. There are a lot of areas in the US where there is no ‘grid’, but there are citizens.
———-
When it comes to spying on your friends, most nations have the good sense not to talk about it outside of a very limited group in very secret places. When you start doing it wholesale, the governments of those friends can’t ignore it, and it creates major problems.
The use of contractors by the US creates another major concern for foreign governments because their business communities are going to be raising hell about it. It isn’t just the US government spying on them, it is their competitors.
Frankly it looks like we aren’t interested in anything but gathering as much data as we possibly can. There is no purpose to it because there is no way we have the people to actually analyze it. We are hoarding data, but no one is actually clear as to why. The ‘reasons’ offered sound more like excuses for a compulsive mental disorder. It is time for an intervention.
7 comments
I just got back from one of those places where there are people but no doctors or hospitals. Thing is, they do have healthcare, they just have to go a long ways to get to it. When one of them had excruciating abdominal pains it was a 90 minute drive just to get him to a hospital, and then the small rural hospital didn’t have facilities for doing that kind of surgery so they airlifted him to Cedars-Sinai instead (it turned out to be a bowel constriction caused by a hernia which in turn had caused gall bladder issues too). And while phone service is sketchy out there (there’s one big rock we fondly call “the phone booth” because it’s the only place in the whole desert valley where you can get a usable 4G signal, and of course there’s no *wired* service anywhere), most of the people who can’t “do” phone service qualify for Medicaid (at least in the states that have done the Obamacare expansion) and are signed up on the spot if they go anywhere near a hospital.
In other words, I don’t see that the phone or Internet requirement is a major issue. Most people without a phone or Internet qualify for Medicaid and will be automatically signed up if they show up at a hospital, so … (shrug).
Actually, 90 minutes isn’t bad, I have relatives in New York that are 3 hours away from a doctor, and there are people in the Adirondacks in Northern New York even farther away. Of course, Alaska is even worse.
You may be able to sign people up in hospitals in California, but that definitely isn’t the way it works in most Southern States – they want to be sure you realize you’re poor and worthless down here, so it is hours in an office filling in paperwork to prove you’re poor.
Well, it’s hours filling in paperwork to prove you’re poor in California too, but they don’t release you from the hospital or ER until you do it, because the hospital or ER wants to be paid :).
Much better situation as the people in charge want you to be accepted, whereas in Florida they are looking for a reason to reject the application. There is usually a better standard for the chairs in ERs than the DFC [Florida welfare] offices in my experience.
That’s another reason why so many states rejected the Medicaid expansion, that part of the bill requires signing people up for Medicaid at the hospital or the state doesn’t qualify for the money. No more ability to torture people with DFC chairs…
No wonder the fraudster-in-chief changed his tune and started talking up the expansion – more money for his industry. They already have more people in accounting than patient care in hospitals to deal with the insurance companies, so this wouldn’t have been much of a stretch for them.
Yes, the hospitals are very much in favor of less uncompensated care…