Quite a long time ago I went through a period without useful health coverage, and those were scary times. Later I was involved with a small group of people bringing the Hospice movement into our rural area in NYS, worked as a volunteer on the 'front lines' with terminally ill people and their families, and learned the horrors of facing serious and terminal health issues either without health coverage or being traumatized and being taken advantage of by insurance companies. At what time are people least equipped to handle the bureaucracy and denials as when they are dying (or someone in their household is)?
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Boomer BeBack
I hate it when people take the "I got mine. Too bad ya don't got yours" attitude about healthcare. We are in it together. Got it or not. And all of it is precarious. To say the least.
|
Boy, isn't this the truth, Boomer! I hate to generalize, whether it's about health care or the price of gas and heating oil or any other issue that's both social
and economic, we tend to bury our heads in the sand, that is, until it affects us personally. Reminds me of the minister in Germany during WWII (can't remember the quote exactly) that as the Nazis came for this group and then that group and then the other group, he didn't speak up as he wasn't a member of any of those groups, and when they came for him, there was no one left to speak up....
Travel makes a thoughtful point--if we're willing to think about it! That is, what's happening
out there will assuredly affect us
in here, even if it's not direct at first, and any attempt to deny it and pretend that everything's hunky dory because "we worked hard all our lives and we deserve it" will only come back to haunt us:
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by travel
What would you do if your health benefits were cut? Do you feel you have enough financial resources to cover your health care needs (before and after eligibility for Medicare).... Will we be forced by employee benefit cuts such as those at GM to increase federal and state spending for increased health care? Do you feel that in their quest for shareholder returns that corporations are in fact driving us to socialized medicine? Something to think about....
|
We have a close friend who's been through the ups and downs of being a businessperson, sometimes working for others and most of the time creating his own businesses, and he maintains that these things always run in cycles, that if the reports are such that, say, the economy is in the toilet, now things can only get better. Maybe this is true, but as I suggested to him, it may be a good thing to have lacked a crystal ball at the beginning of the Great Depression just how long that cycle would take--how many people wouldn't even live to see the end of it--and how many people lived with lasting effects of it for years afterwards....
Call me a pessimist if you wish (and personally I am not; those who know my personal life and what I've lived through know this), but until 'the cycle' reverses itself, we're in deep excrement, IMHO....