Social Safety Nets

[_MeDotOrg]

I've ridden the bus with Seniors,

ldsfaqs, you ride the bus? Would Ayn Rand approve? Isn't that PUBLIC transportation? Government-subsidized? SOCIALIST transportation? Did YOU build that?

i myself take the bus, but I am a hopeless trade-unionist reprobate.

[_ajax18]

ajax,

I should be able to reply to you later after work. In the meantime, if you're interested, you may want to google "sjogren's syndrome".

I know what Sjogren's syndrome is. I know that dry eye can be bad enough to cause people to have their eyelids sewn shut. This was not a case of extreme dry eye.

[_Analytics]

Why were you not eligible? And can you share at least some of those 1000s of cases of people getting things they don't deserve, and the reverse?

Buying health insurance from the school was going to increase the amount of loan money I would have to take. I ended up suffering a very painful inguinal hernia, partly just due to the stress of trying to make the grade. My first quote was $10k to have it fixed...

My point is that socialism is still unfair. It might give social justice to some...

As a free agent in a free-market system, you made the choice not to purchase health insurance. You then had bad luck and suffered the consequences. That sucks. But don't blame that on Socialism.

If the Affordable Care Act would have been in place, you would have been required to purchase excellent health insurance, and would have received financial assistance to be able to afford it. You should be a huge supporter of that system so that people won't have to go through what you did.

[_beastie]

ajax,

I should be able to reply to you later after work. In the meantime, if you're interested, you may want to google "sjogren's syndrome".

I know what Sjogren's syndrome is. I know that dry eye can be bad enough to cause people to have their eyelids sewn shut. This was not a case of extreme dry eye.

So you know sjogren's can be physically debilitating, and it can involve far more than dry eyes. It can look like severe lupus. But you know enough about the case to know that it was frivolous and should have been rejected.

So why, in your view, did it go through?

[_beastie]

Buying health insurance from the school was going to increase the amount of loan money I would have to take. I ended up suffering a very painful inguinal hernia, partly just due to the stress of trying to make the grade. My first quote was $10k to have it fixed. I called the welfare office. They said I'd have to come to an appointment before anything could be decided. I missed class to be told, "You're not pregnant and you don't have kids. Those are the only cases we're covering now." A lot of times you don't get a reason. You have to hire lawyers if you want to get that far and spend more money still. In WV the lawyer gets 1/3 of a permanently injured worker's workers compensation check each month as long as the worker lives. You're at the mercy of whoever is in charge of dolng out the resources. Now according to Obamacare, a nonelected group of appointed bureaucrets decide who gets healthcare. Working no longer betters your chances of getting medical help or attention.

More often than not, nonelected groups of paid bureaucrats who are watching the bottom line for profit are deciding who gets healthcare. If you don't know that, you've never dealt with an insurance company.

A vietnam veteran was denied disability even though he had lost his leg at the hip in battle. Military pensions apparently did not contain a cost of living increase and his pension was now little more than $250/month. No help from the welfare office, even when he showed a copious number of deskjobs he'd applied for unsuccessfully.

I saw a fellow teacher recently diagnosed with cancer. When the school board got word of it, they immediately fired her. I doubt medicaid did much for her. I hope they at least gave her a few painkillers to ease her transistion out of this world. She was probably too sick to fight it and work the system the way you need to if you want to get money out of it.

I think she has a case for a lawsuit.

Cases of abuse of the system

I was asked to sign a form for a lady to receive diability benefits because she had, "Dry eye." Yes, people get disability for this, apparently if your in cahoots with the all powerful distributor of the resources.

I was asked to sign a form to provide $1200/month disability payments to the parents of an 8 yoa girl with esotropia. First of all, "Why is an 8 yoa girl considered a wage earner in the family." Secondly esotropia while definitely a condition that requires medical treatment, is certainly not disabling for most jobs, and yet this child was rewarded permanent disability status for the rest of her life. This family had been pulling money for that each month since she was 2 yoa. This wasn't for medical treatment mind you, just straight cash.

Even with this living off disability isn't much of a living. Most of these guys work under the table. It's not always selling drugs but it's always something that can't be easily traced by the IRS. I'd ask people what they do for a living and there was a huge number of people employed as private investigators to track down medicare fraud, medcaid fraud, insurance fraud. It went on and on. Selling food stamps for cash that was supposed to give the kids some food, etc.

My point is that socialism is still unfair. It might give social justice to some, but it only does that by being unfair to another. It gives people an incentive to put their energy and mental power into professions like law or simply beating the system because that's what pays. People aren't motivated to produce something useful or create wealth and that is where the biggest loss comes in addition to the fraud. When a nations smartest people are becoming lawyers and politicians rather than scientists and engineers, the nation truly does start to digest itself from the insides.

There is no doubt that some fraud is going to be involved. But is that a reason to discard the whole program? It seems to be better to improve how to fight fraud, which the Obama administration did.

http://westernfarmpress.com/government/ ... tamp-fraud

It seems to me that your problem isn't that we're socialist. It's that we're NOT socialist. If we lived in a socialist country your healthcare would have been covered. But we don't, so you weren't. We live in a society that has chosen to devote a limited amount of money to healthcare for the most needy, and more often than not, the neediest are deemed to be dependent children.

[_EAllusion]

ajax seems to be confusing a Obamacare with a single payer system.

[_Droopy]

ajax seems to be confusing a Obamacare with a single payer system.

The ACA is a precursor to a single payer, fully socialized (nationalized) system, as Obama himself has long ago made clear, and as the fundamental structural components of Obamacare make quite obvious.

[_EAllusion]

The ACA is a precursor to a single payer, fully socialized (nationalized) system,

There certainly are a sizeable group of liberals who want that to be the case. Nonetheless, ajax is criticizing Obamacare and seems to be laboring under some confusion about what it is.

as Obama himself has long ago made clear,

That's a sop to liberals who clearly want the ACA to be a next step in an evolution to to single payer and it's not clear how much Obama actually favors that. Obama also publicly pretended to advocate for a public option that was latter belied by leaked material showing he never was serious about pushing it and had already conceded it at the get go.

and as the fundamental structural components of Obamacare make quite obvious.

Obamacare was largely written by conservative think thanks years ago and pushed by the insurance industry, as it acts as a massive forced subsidy to them, for years leading into the passage of the ACA.

[Guest]

ajax seems to be confusing a Obamacare with a single payer system.

It's a common delusion on the right. But they are so accustomed to shouting "Socialist!" at every turn, it's almost to be expected.

The ACA is a precursor to a single payer, fully socialized (nationalized) system, as Obama himself has long ago made clear, and as the fundamental structural components of Obamacare make quite obvious.

I wish that were the case, but the ACA is a long way from that, considering how it props up and pumps money and customers into the private insurance industry.

[_moksha]

I imagine many Republicans have bemoaned the communication difficulty with their domestic help and how they frequently have to run interference with immigration officials in the form of monetary tokens. With the American social safety net disabled they could have documented English speaking household help. This would also ease the burden, of traveling all the way to Thailand, for many Republican businessmen seeking to escape from the strictures of socialistic Western morality. With the end of the safety net and deregulation of business, as they say on Broadway, anything goes. When you hear the screams of a child, Ayn Rand gets another gold cigar.