Or else we’ll just seize it from your paycheck.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday she might be willing to have workers’ wages garnisheed if they refuse to buy health insurance to achieve coverage for all Americans.
The New York senator has criticized presidential rival Barack Obama for pushing a health plan that would not require universal coverage. Clinton has not always specified the enforcement measures she would embrace, but when pressed during a television interview, she said: “I think there are a number of mechanisms” that are possible, including “going after people’s wages, automatic enrollment.”
Clinton said such measures would apply only to workers who can afford health coverage but refuse to buy it, which puts undue pressure on hospitals and emergency rooms. Under her plan, she said, health care “will be affordable for everyone” because she would limit premium payments “to a low percent of your income.”
Well, how nice of her. I especially like the part about “going after people’s wages” as if we don’t have enough of THAT in this country.
Does Hillary Clinton intentionally want to lose?
Look, it has always been my belief that people’s income should never be taxed. What should be taxed is trade (tariffs) and consumption (sales taxes), and taxes on corporations (not small business). Under the current scheme, the government has collected more than enough taxes to have given everyone in this country Canadian style single payer health insurance AND a world class educational system.
But we didn’t do that. Instead, we spent it on a war machine to rule the world. You get what you choose and, again, as long as Americans continue their red, white and blue love affair with militarism, we’ll never have the society that our founding fathers envisioned.
Period.
And, in fact, it may be too late regardless.
Be that as it may, the fact that we absolutely refuse to enter the family of civilized western nations and have a single payer national health care plan for all, we get people like Clinton who come up with increasingly confiscatory and fascist plans to force people to turn a percentage of money SHE deems necessary to the corporate medical establishment and Big Pharma, who both have been raping the American people for decades in search of greater Wall Street profits.
ALL of the present candidates’ plans ONLY make the health insurers and health care companies fantastically wealthy (like the oil companies) and deliver the same shitty care we’re becoming used to in an increasingly Third World health care environment.
But you know, those B-1 bombers and nuclear subs cost a LOT of money!
So they all blather on about “universal” health care but won’t go to the only logical solution because they’re so afraid of being called SOCIALIST!
You may hate the Federal bureaucracy and Goddess knows, there’s a lot to dislike. But I’ve never heard of a government worker telling a woman that she was being placed on the “terminal patient roster” (i.e. ‘you’re going to die’) on the phone, but that happened with Aetna and that person was the mother of my children back in the 90s.
I’ll take the government over those Wall Street serving rat-bastards any day.
But we live in a country, infected by a pernicious form of Christianity and Puritanicalism, where God-fearing folk will say with a straight face, that they don’t think people who don’t make enough money deserve life saving health care.
I saw earlier today on CNN’s Dr. Gupta show, a couple who lived in Las Vegas and were both successful real estate agents. They lived in a nice house - the Whole American Dream ™. Then tragedy struck - the woman had the temerity to deliver a baby (one of twins) with severe medical problems. The couple had great health insurance - or so they thought. Their policy had a $2 million lifetime limit and the treatment for the baby girl blew through that pretty quick. After 18 months their child died and the hospital promptly sued the couple for over $700,000. They’re declaring bankruptcy but thanks to the conservatives and toady Democrats, the new bankruptcy law will ensure that this couple remains in severe debt slavery for many, many years, if not their entire lives.
And we say that’s OK, right?
If it could happen to them, then what about the millions of uninsured or those working just to get by. Despite what Limbaugh and his ilk say, it really is ‘your money or your life.’ And even if you survive a serious medical procedure, the resulting bills may make you feel you’d have been better off dying.
This is our so-called ‘culture of life.’
And I heard another couple on CNN say that’s what you save up for a ‘rainy day’ for. How many people in GW Bush’s America just have a couple of hundred thousand dollars lying around? And is it in any way just for a society to say you have to sell everything you own and go into severe debt slavery for the rest of your life for the privilege of having your life saved?
Is this REALLY the society we want?
But the best we’ll get are these ridiculous ‘universal’ schemes which will only make Wall Street investors happy. The right people make money, the rest of us suffer. It seems to be The American Way.
8 responses so far ↓
Kirk // February 20, 2008 at 10:49 am
Sounds like the author feels that he is owed something. I’ve lost people too, but I guess I still don’t feel that I have the right to compel others to pay for my health expenses.
The author sarcastically refers to having to pay for the ‘privilege’ of having your life saved. Well, what else is it?
Do you have the right to force a hospital to treat you, free of charge? Or does your rights stop at forcing me to pay the bill? I guess I (we) owe you that somehow.
I agree that Clintons plan to force us to buy health care is an outrage, but your solution seems equally wrong headed.
kegbot1 // February 20, 2008 at 11:14 am
Fine then. Triage the poor - let them die. They’re not really all that ‘productive’ are they? What do the ‘producers’ in society need with people like that anyway?
In a civilized society, not the dog-eat-dog America we live in, people don’t have to worry about spending the rest of their lives in poverty for the privilege of having their lives saved.
Kirk, people like you will never get it. You put a price tag on everything in life, including life. And despite the fact that most of your kind call yourself Christians you absolutely do not heed Christ’s call to be your brother’s keeper. Supply side Jesus is more your cup of tea.
And you have NO objections to having your precious tax dollars spent on weapons of death to spread our pernicious form of ‘democracy’ all over the world at the barrel of a gun. But talk about spending that money for health care or a local school levy and people like you wail like stuck pigs.
Check this out:
http://tinyurl.com/364gn7
Betcha have no problems with Cleveland Clinic holding that man’s scalp for hostage.
I hope one day we’ll get a world without people who think like you.
Allison // February 27, 2008 at 9:31 pm
… have a single payer national health care plan for all, we get people like Clinton who come up with increasingly confiscatory and fascist plans to force people to turn a percentage of money SHE deems necessary…
How do you suppose Canada and the UK pay for their universal coverage? Taxes. Huge taxes. Like our taxes, they come out of the peoples’ paychecks, among other sources. Everything costs. Nothing is free. The government always wants more-more-more, so when they’ve got your money, they’ll only be able to save costs by rationing your care. Or downright denying it. All the evil insurance company tricks we’re hearing about? You think the government will be better? Ask all those Canadian and British medical tourists to the good ol’ US.
I truly don’t get why the idea of paying directly for your very own medical care is such a horror. Why is that so bad? You can’t afford it? Do you have cable? A cell phone? A private blog and high speed internet? How about insurance- got that? I guess when you walk into Starbucks without money, they have the temerity to refuse you your latte.
Jeez Louise, I’ve always been a conservative- never thought I’d find myself for Hillary, but she’s the only candidate in the bunch with a quantifiable plan and the cajones to stand behind it. God help me, I’m beginning to consider voting for her. That makes me want to go take a shower and wash my brain.
Allison // February 27, 2008 at 9:37 pm
…I’ll take the government over those Wall Street serving rat-bastards any day…
Oh, sorry, forgot that part. Been to the DMV lately? You’ve got more faith in the gub’mint than I do. Also, Medicare might sound good to the patient, until they try to find a doctor, because they screw the docs on their payment. My dad stopped taking Medicare patients years ago, and he’s been known to take payment in the form of chickens and garden dirt. (Small town.)
kegbot1 // February 27, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Allison:
Do you have any problem with paying taxes to support the war machine? We spend more on the military than the next nine nations COMBINED. WE HAD THE MONEY FOR SINGLE PAYER. We peed it away to Halliburton.
I can bore you and the rest of your ‘bootstrap’ crowd with stories about hard working people who lost EVERYTHING because of medical bills no honest man could pay - and several of them HAD insurance.
I know MANY Canadians and they wouldn’t trade theirs for ours for anything. You need to do your homework.
Yes I HAVE been to the DMV lately and they were fine. And when you say “gub’mint” you reveal yourself as a typical redneck know-nothing. Grow up. Single payer is what civilized western nations do for their people rather than funding a rapacious and predatory war machine.
Go vote for McCain. He’ll make sure only the ‘deserving’ get health care. You can walk over the bodies of the rest.
Allison // February 28, 2008 at 12:52 am
No, I don’t mind funding the war machine. I’d rather the military fight terrorists in Iraq than have civillians fight them in New York.
I’ve been to the DMV lately, too, and I”d prefer not to have surgery there.
And those people that lost ‘everything’, are they alive? Than they didn’t lose ‘everything.’ Who told you that $2.5 million dollars worth of surgery would be free? If you don’t pay for it, who does? The government can’t pay for it, the government dosen’t have any money. The people have money. The government has taxation. Grow up yourself, and pay for your own insurance. Or at least make your best stab at it.
And before calling me a ‘know nothing’ why don’t you remove the redundant comment you posted on your own blog?
kegbot1 // February 28, 2008 at 8:15 am
Ah so you believe the fairy tales your government tells you so long as they are Republican fairy tales. Your DMV comment makes no sense - apples and oranges. But I expect that from people like you.
You obviously haven’t met too many people outside your social circles, people who will live out the rest of their lives in grinding poverty because of medical bills no honest person could pay.
Educate yourself on Canadian single payer:
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/mythbusting-canadian-health-care-part-i
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/mythbusting-canadian-healthcare-part-ii-debunking-free-marketeers
Here’s the Harvard 2005 study on medical bankruptcy:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9447-2005Feb8.html
Again, if you wish not to live in a civilized country, but a dog-eat-dog rapacious capitalist state where only those with means are allowed to get proper health care, I guess that says more about your soul and feeling for your fellow human beings than anything I could write.
Conservative (Fascist) Letters to The Pain Dealer « Bad American // February 29, 2008 at 11:44 am
[...] drains on their precious tax dollars which they so grudgingly part with - unless of course, like Allison, it’s to kill brown skinned people in faraway foreign lands of which they know [...]
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