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 ...
This article almost illustrates the need for mental illness hospitals and live-in wards for those who cannot manage their own lives.
“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....”
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Reductio ad absurdum is so much fun.
How long to you propose that Obabacare pay for a 51 year old man’s housing?
This might sound good in the short run, but it will lead to perversity of result in the long run.Forcing some people to give others the unearned, the undeserved, and something for nothing is an assault on justice, and is tantamount to abolition of causality in the receipt of income.It also leads to punishing productiveness and rewarding non productiveness.Eventually everyone would have the incentive to do as little as possible, and society would become less and less free.This would result in transforming America into a hellhole.
Perhaps the solution lies in, not making life easier for more people, but in making it hard enough that they have some motivation to WORK THINGS OUT FOR THEMSELVES. They have a choice of trying to improve their lives by making the effort to be self-reliant, or they have the choice of trying to improve their lives by asking the dwindling number of us who pay taxes to pay MORE.
Your posts would indicate that you have eliminated the whole first option from the available remedies. And that makes it a liberal argument, not at all related to “economics 101”.
Dollars and cents is economics.
You miss the point.
They should. However, we live in a society in which housing gets more expensive.
And if we’re not going to raise wages to make work more attractive, we still face the problem of cost-shifting.
Its not going to go away because taxpayers sooner or later foot the bill.
My, what a concept! Provide housing and care for the homeless and mentally ill. Seems like we used to do this. There were state hospitals that took care of such people. Then the liberals decided all these people needed to be “free”.
Two hundred years ago, even one hundred years ago, people worked to provide for themselves or they starved. Family or community charity might provide a rudimentary subsistence existence for the aged, physically or mentally disabled, as well as widows and orphans but anyone capable of doing menial labor chose between working or starving. The weak and lazy often did not survive.
Today progressives are steadily increasing the burden on the productive class by increasing the number of people supported by the community as well as the standard of “subsistence” to which the unproductive are entitled. At some point the burden will become too great and the economic system will collapse.
Leftists throughout history have consistently demonstrated a willingness to kill off millions of people in order to achieve the goals of the state. In an economic collapse scenario, where resources are insufficient to support the population, a leftist dictatorship will not shy from eliminating unproductive citizens rather than take measures to return to free market prosperity. The elderly will be the first to go followed by the sick, the disabled, and ultimately the lazy. The children of today’s welfare parasites are likely to experience a rude awakening during their lifetime. Today’s benefactors, the liberal elites, may one day be their worst nightmare.
My housing is getting more expensive.
My wages have not changed in years.
But I do not look to the government to fix either of these situations. I can look for less expensive housing. I can ask for a raise, find a different job, or find an additional job.
But I cannot just say, WOE IS ME, the government is going to have to do something for me.
You are advocating that as the “only” solution.
How about we NOT raise wages, but we CUT the social/welfare benefits? So the recipients of these handouts are forced into working to improve their lives.
Taxpayers should NOT sooner or later have to foot the bill. The people who “need” all these social services should sooner or later have to foot the bill, and/or they should contribute to the tax revenues.
For the working, tax-paying minority to continue down this road of providing more and more for people who refuse to help themselves - it is a dead end road. When do you think it is enough of my income to pay for someone’s living expenses, who just refuses to work, because collecting benefits is so much easier?
What is the threshold beyond which TOO MANY benefits actually hurt the so-called poor?
you are so wrong and so out of your league - your analysis is shallow and sophmoric - and again, based on your assumption of liberal tenants.
Again, I don’t expect you to understand.
Hmm...author doesn’t mention that the money used for these programs first had to be taken from taxpayers under threat of force.
The problem is too much freedom. If everyone had to live in government barracks and eat government-approved meals everybody would be healthy and happy. And we'd all be rich, too, because the government would just give us money! Why didn't somebody ever think of this before?
Me too. But they're going to go the hyperinflation route, impoverishing us all.
I ran a homeless veteran program out of a YMCA that resembled that in several ways. We paid for their room at the Y, we had a vendor bring them two meals a day which were placed in a freezer to be microwaved later, we bought them tools, work clothes, bus passes, gas cards and such for their jobs and we counseled them on finding a job while the Y’s man counseled them on mental health.
Obolacare is going to bankrupt us as it is, so we better expand it to include housing. /channeling progressive think. Obolacare is not even fully implemented yet and the progs are looking to expand it. Give it ten years and it won’t be 1/6 of the economy it will be 100% all encompassing law. Thanks Chief Justice Roberts.
Dialysis has been an entitlement for a very long time - Obamacare has nothing to do with extending its reach, and may in fact curb availability as funding decreases in out years.
Next it will be free servants, all to take care of you, cook your food, and make sure you get to the doctor on time. Sheesh.
Government already has healthcare as a gun to force people to go along with it. Why not control housing for the same reason?
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