Got a Job, Can’t Afford Health Coverage

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/03/28/got-a-job-cant-afford-health-coverage/

by Mike Hall, Mar 28, 2008

More than 47 million people in this country have no health insurance. Yet the vast majority of those who have no health insurance are employed—a travesty that sometimes ends with tragic consequences, as Sharon from Michigan told the AFL-CIO/Working America 2008 Health Care for America Survey.

My mother-in-law was employed in a low-wage job that did not provide health care coverage. She became ill and could not afford to go to a doctor on her own. My husband and I urged her to go, stating we would pay for the visit.



By the time she got to the doctor, she had pneumonia and required hospitalization. The pneumonia placed so much stress on her system that she ended up dying. If she had had health care coverage and been able to go to the doctor for treatment earlier, she likely would not have died.

Nearly 27,000 people took the survey and close to 7,500 of those, like Sharon, shared stories about their personal experiences with the nation’s broken health care system.

Some 95 percent of the people who took the survey—union and nonunion workers, young and old, insured and uninsured—say the health care system in this country needs fundamental change or to be completely rebuilt.


FULL story at link.

[ikojo]

1. Thank Bill and Hillary Clinton for the poor

"benefits" provided to American workers. They supported NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO as well as PNTR with China. All in the name of corporate profits. Of course they both have tax payer funded health care.

When American workers must compete with the wages and benefits offered to contract workers or workers in India or China, Americans lose out every time.

Thank you Hillary and Bill for selling American workers down the river! And people want another four years of that crap?

[mrreowwr_kittty]

3. And now she wants to garnish the wages of these people

To send money to the insurance industry. It's the most blatant form of corporate welfare imaginable and it's being sold as "universal health care". What's sad is so many progressives are falling for the propaganda.

[Kitty Herder]

5. Agreed. nt

[1776Forever]

11. Try 1.2 Billion profit just for 1 of them in 2007! Nixon started them up!

One of these is WellCare and was investigated last year for fraud;

http://www.reuters.com/article/bankingfinancial-SP/idUSN1322579020070214

Total revenue more than doubled to $1.2 billion from $511.5 million.

And..........

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/26/business/26wellcare.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

(snip)

WellCare manages benefits for 160,000 elderly customers under Medicare plans and for 1.2 million low-income recipients of Medicaid benefits. The company, based in Tampa, Fla., is being investigated by federal and Florida authorities over possible overpayments, according to court records.

.............

And we wonder why our poor cannot get quality health care!!! Yet we allow these billion dollar industries to go on unchecked in most cases! Why??????? This has to stop and we need to have health care be a top priority in this country and cut the payments to these fat cats!!!

:argh:

[enid602]

4. health care

Don't worry, Obama has said he'll appoint an 'advisory' group on health care, just like he did in Illinois a decade ago.

[Donnachaidh]

8. what an absolute CROCK of bullshit!

Want someone to BLAME for the way things are NOW? Try blaming the REAL architects of the disaster -- NIXON and his idiot savant Earlichman<sp>.

All your GDP arguments blaming Clinton for this shows how LITTLE you know of the history of the healthcare problems in this country. Try reading up on HOW the HMO's came into being, and how the Republicans were the footsoldiers of all the havoc the American public is dealing with now.

:rant:

[Kitty Herder]

13. Nixon is dead. Now we have to hold our current leaders accountable for

fixing it. And I don't think Clinton is any more to blame than anybody else in the halls of power. Or at least, not much more, because she was charged with fixing it in the 90s and didn't even consider REAL solutions. But certainly those in congress who have not considered the Conyers single payer bill are very much to blame as well.

[ikojo]

14. I work for an HMO and I KNOW their profits

increased exponentially during the 1990s as the Clintons led a charge to privatize Medicare by opening up the program to HMOs. Oh trust me they make a boat load of money on Medicare and Medicaid.

[madokie]

2. I've worked all my life and the only health insurance I've had is the VA

and I feel lucky to have that still.

[Kitty Herder]

6. Let's face it. Our politicians are not going to just "give" us health care.

Most of them are completely in the pockets of the insurance companies and that includes BOTH our Democratic presidential candidates to one degree or another. (There are a few exception in congress, like Kucinich and Conyers.)

We as citizens MUST agitate for single-payer health care until the force of our resistance is stronger than the money of the insurance companies. Remember there are more of us than there are of them. That's the only way it will ever happen.

[Raster]

9. Our politicians includes Clinton AND Obabma. Both are a tad too cozy with the

insurance and health care vultures. Neither one of them has offered a good alternative to the medical insurance parasites.

[Kitty Herder]

12. Yep. Didn't I state that clearly enough in my post? nt

[Earth_First]

7. :raises hand:

The rage that I feel when I am told by Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck et. al that if I cannot afford healthcare I am simply not working hard enough.

These blowhards would have heart attacks spending ONE day in my boots under the physical demands of the work that I do 60 hours a week to survive.

[truedelphi]

10. the Powers that Be immediately placed this country into a 2 trillion

Dollar war, and over these past weeks, our treasury handed almost a trillion dollars over to the incompentent money managers on Wall Street.

Yet we keep being told that universal health care coversage needs to be handled incrmentally.


Why? If we weren't wasting our money on socialism for the military induistrial complex and on socializing Wall Street, we could have been given free universal health care for the six to seven years!!