This page ©2001
Chip
Brown.
10 Care
I see where we're being threatened with health insurance again in Tennessee.
If they don't get their income tax they're going to have to cut TennCare,
the state subsidized insurance so many Tennessee folk depend on. This
amounts
to extortion in my book. They might as well say
if you don't send us money, we'll do something bad to your grandma. Now we
wouldn't want to see your grandma have an unfortunate accident would we?
No, nobody can put a price on an old person's health today. Or the health of families, who have lost their jobs or are too sick to work. These people are deserving of help, and the only one capable of deciding the worth of their lives are HMO's. So our state says, send us more money or all these people will suffer and it's all your fault, because we've already spent the last money you sent us.
Our old folks live in fear of the cost of an injury, an illness or being run down by elephants in a downtown alley. This last fear was my grandmother's before she was locked away. We don't have easy access to healthcare in America, but everyone can buy a gun. Now, I'm not for gun control, don't start writing me. My house is stockpiled and I'm armed to the teeth like a good Tennessee native. However, something strikes me odd that our government says we have the right to guns, but not to healthcare. I guess they figure if you get sick enough you can always get a gun and shoot yourself.
A couple of years ago I had to go to a plastic surgeon. No, I didn't have a facelift, if I had, I would ask for a refund, because I'm still ugly. But this guy charged like $50 a minute to work on me. For that kind of money he should be the one taking off the clothes.
But old folks are terribly afraid of doctors. Not of getting a shot but of finding out if afterward they can still afford some groceries. Doctors tell old people here are the medicines you can't afford but need. And it's worse if the doctor doesn't know what's wrong with grandma, they send off stuff to a lab. Then grandma has to pay some other doctor she won't meet, to cover the ignorance of the one who she went to.
They tell them things like, "you may have stomach cancer or it may be gas, we'll send this to the lab." I figure there is some guy in a room somewhere that decides these things with the flip of a coin.
But our politicians don't care. They look at healthcare reform as being not so healthy for those who have money. I guess they figure if those old folks needed healthcare so bad they would have hired lobbyists to take their Congressmen on cruises though the Bahamas, like the cigarette industry.
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