Posted on 10/27/2014 11:54:32 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Since January 1 of this year, James Barnes has had pretty decent health care. He gets insulin for his diabetes and the needles to inject it, blood pressure medication, access to a psychiatrist and counselor and optometrist, and frequent visits to the doctor, all for free.
Barnes lives in Maryland, one of the dozens of states that expanded Medicaid to people with incomes at or below 138 percent of the poverty level as part of the Affordable Care Act. For Barnes and thousands like him, that expansion has meant access to services like physical therapy, mental-health treatment, x-rays, dialysis, hospice care, eye exams, substance-abuse treatment, podiatrists, and oncologists.
What Barnes does not have, however, is a place to live. Since getting out of jail a year and a half ago, he’s stayed at half a dozen homeless shelters in Baltimore as he’s looked for work. He carries his belongings—and his insulin—with him in two plastic bags, the type you’d get at CVS.
Being homeless doesn’t exactly help Barnes, who is 51, become healthier. When he first started living on the streets, he’d have to borrow a few dollars to buy food to keep his diabetes in check. Even now, he isn’t allowed to bring food into the homeless shelters, so he doesn’t often eat produce or healthy food, instead relying on the starchy, heavy food at soup kitchens. He avoids taking any of his medications that could make him urinate frequently, since it’s so hard to find somewhere to go to the bathroom, and people at homeless shelters often steal his needles and medication....
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
ah. I have discovered the source of the problem.
I thought that plan was already in place.
Of course, as long as you are of the right demographic group that supports the ruling class.
Otherwise, well, still yes, but you’ll do the paying.
0bamacare should pay for annual mid-winter vacations to Bermuda.
What else will give you that healthy glow?
And a personal trainer.
Let’s just give everyone a million dollars a year - everyone on the planet - and be done with it. We will all be rich and infinitely happy....
I expect Øcare is already paying for Ebola treatments, at $500,000 per patient, dead or alive.
I’m gonna start up my Give-a-Sh_t machine now.
Trying ...
Still trying ...
Hmmmm. Sounds like the battery’s dead. Check back next millennium.
Well at least he doesn’t live in California or Austin, Texas. Otherwise he wouldn’t even have his two CVS plastic bags.
From the hospital’s point of view, its easier to help its poorest patients get into an apartment than have to eat the costs of hospitalizing them.
Its less expensive to keep someone healthy by keeping them off the streets and on their medications than its than to have them become sick and cost the hospital thousands of dollars per day in room and board they can’t financially recoup.
So housing subsidies are going to become inevitable as a means of bringing health care costs under control.
If it’s free housing he wants, the simple solution will be to rob a bank and get caught.
NOW I want to be first in line to see this .
If you mean jail, taxpayers are on the hook too for the care of geriatric prisoners.
And that is also expensive.
Red Skelton built a career on that notion.
Ahhhhh, The Atlantic.....filled with garbage, old crabs and s**t. It’s also the name of an ocean.
If you are receiving health care, and you’re not paying for it, it means someone else is paying for your health care. It’s not “free”.
I’m sure he likes his free stuff...
And it all comes without the need to work...
And those who do work end up paying for it all...
....dude, you’re off your meds.....
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