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Mon, Jun. 20th, 2011, 08:36 pm
This. Is. Fucking. OBSCENE.

This is the state things have degenerated to in our country:
A 59-year-old man has been jailed in Gastonia, N.C., on charges of larceny after allegedly robbing an RBC Bank for $1 so he could get health care in prison. Richard James Verone handed a female teller a note demanding the money and claiming that he had a gun, according to the police report.

He then sat down and waited for police to arrive. "… I say, 'I'll be sitting right over here, on the chair, waiting for the police,'" Verone told reporters, recalling the June 9 robbery in an interview from Gaston County Jail.

And wait for the police, he did.

"He's sitting on the sofa as you walk in the front door," the bank teller said in a 911 call.

Police arrested Verone where he sat. He was unarmed.
Bankers have obscene profits and golden parachutes.

Members of Congress and their cronies have superb health care, paid for by us.

The insurance companies make money hand over fist.

And the rest of us are just fuckin' hosed.

To the point where it seems like a very reasonable, even responsible, choice to get yourself arrested for armed robbery, if only you can get the care you need.

THIS HAS GOT TO STOP.

We need single payer, and we need it NOW. We need the insurance companies, leeching off the country and doing nothing except taking money as middlemen, to go away NOW. We need the motherfuckers who broke our economy in prison, and we need it NOW. We need their too-big-to-fail banks to fuckin' FAIL, because if we can then by FSM they can.

Yeah, I know none of it's practical, and none of it will happen.

Fuck that.

If it doesn't happen eventually, our nation is doomed.
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Tue, Jun. 21st, 2011 05:09 am (UTC)
tcgtrf

The problem with Single-payer is that it would have to rely on the same corrupt Senators and Representatives that you're complaining about earlier in the post to implement it and keep it funded.

It's not going to happen, at least not in a way that doesn't shunt money from the 75% of the people who still have some kind of job into the pockets of corporate officials.

The country (as I've said for the past five years) that we grew up in is gone. The biggest questions are how to insure that at least one of the pieces that the country splits into is a decent place for us to live in and how to insure that there's a minimum of violence during the collapse.

Tom Trumpinski
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Tue, Jun. 21st, 2011 07:06 am (UTC)
lemmozine

Maybe single-payer would work if we got the mafia to operate it. They seem to have a better understanding of how to operate a successful business than the govt. And a better-defined moral code.
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Tue, Jun. 21st, 2011 02:22 pm (UTC)
teddywolf

Those self-same senators and representatives have done a good job with Medicare and Medicaid, actually, at least before the Ryan plan. The government could do single payer pretty well if it were given a chance.
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Tue, Jun. 21st, 2011 04:25 pm (UTC)
redneckgaijin

I'd feel better about this if, based on your past comments here, I wasn't pretty sure your definition of "decent place to live" included "abolish Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; root, hog, or die."
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Tue, Jun. 21st, 2011 06:00 pm (UTC)
tcgtrf

My personal ideology doesn't matter at all in this particular part of the debate because it includes a prohibition on charging *you* (involuntarily) as much as a single dollar and calls for the disarming of the police so that there is no way I could force my philosophy on you even if I was the Fearless Leader of such a hypothetical state.

To be honest, Medicare *has* worked for its users, even if it, like the US highway system, has had unforseen consequences ( in its case, the skyrocketing cost of health care due to lack of concern over costs).

The problems now are that there's been the prescription drug add-on which increases the outlay greatly and that the US is no longer building the "developing" world with high-tech produced exports, as it was during the 60s when Medicare was conceived and implemented.

Hell, we were able to fight both the Cold War and Vietnam, go to the Moon, and create a whole slew of social programs all simultaneously because our economy was robust. The folks we sold stuff to are now our competitors and globalization allows corporations to seek the lowest bidder world-wide to produce their products.

In other words, there's no money coming in and there is not enough in savings to continue running the government that we have, let alone expand what it does and fight 2 1/2 imperial wars.

It just cannot go on, even for a decade. There is no solution--it's a Crazy Eddie situation.

Tom T.
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