One of the last ambulance runs I made before leaving EMS was to take an attempted suicide to a specialist facility down south. For free. Patient lacked insurance, the town wouldn’t cover a non-911 transfer, and the nurses bitterly mocked the doctor for being unreasonable in asking an ambulance crew to transfer that “smelly piece of white trash.” The Intermediate driving tried to get me to toss the patient out of the truck when she got severely emotional. I had to clean the back of the rig alone because my colleague refused to deal with the smell left by the patient.
Our healthcare system sucks. Healthcare sucks. Almost no one in any part of the world would deal with the filth, suffering, turbulent and long hours, and constant sorrow without a healthy paycheck. Certainly not enough to keep the medical machine running. And even those self-less doctors and nurses are still people with all of the failings attributable to our species.
So, healthcare is expensive by its very nature, and flawed by its dependence on its staff.
Who pays the bill? The patient? Society? A charity? Right now, all of the above. Some ambulance services and hospitals are idealists and will eat costs to help their fellow man. Charities don’t receive enough donations to pay shit even when tax-deductible and run locally by people personally invested in the patient. Fuck asking the patient to pay, poor people get sick, too. But we do that by necessity.
So, the taxpayer is the obvious choice of benefactor: a charity coerced at governmental knife-point. And our petrochemicals get more expensive, and taxes go up, discouraging people from bumping up a new bracket, and it gets harder for the poor to scrape by, necessitating further welfare.
No one has a better plan than, “fuck you, got mine”, “have fun filing for bankruptcy”, or “everyone, gimme more money, no, more…MORE.”
Obamacare isn’t evil. It isn’t stupid. It isn’t inherently bad. Obama is none of those things, either. The masses that elected him are none of those things. We are all human beings on the same rat-infested, sinking ship known as mortality. We’re all fucked in the end and our plans to issue life boats are no better than theirs. Assuming we even have plans.
You may all now resume screaming at each other for caring. Wait, let me pop some corn, first.
neoconhawk
Butch Cassidy
