The thing that makes me saddest about all of this debate over health care and finances is to read that there are actually some people who believe that everyone who is poor did something evil or bad to make themselves that way, they deserve to stay that way because they're all druggies or whores or just bad lazy people who deserved to die in the gutter, and that helping them to help themselves makes our government "socialistic".
When did that happen? That the people who think they have God in their pocket think that charity to the poor and compassion for their plight and wanting to help them better themselves are liberal tricks to convert everyone to socialism?
These are the kind of people who see someone in the unemployment line or at the welfare office getting food stamps who has been looking hard for a job every week since laid off and yells, "Get a job!" at them.
I'm one of those people. My husband and I both lost our jobs. We used to be almost middle class, but had no health care provisions because of pre-existing conditions and neither of our jobs offered health care. We made decent enough money, but my husband got very sick and we lost nearly everything.
I'm not a drug dealer, a hooker or a welfare scam artist. I'm a person trying to find work, regain something of what I lost, and re-train for a better job in this economy. My husband's line of work, construction plumbing was hard hit and now he's too generally disabled to do that kind of physical work every day. He's in his fifties with multiple health problems that he's ironically finally getting cared for now that we're so poor we can get Medicaid...I have two minor kids, so we qualify. He finally found work after 5 months of both looking and recovering from his serious infection. He now makes 15 dollars less an hour than he used to make, and can only work 4 days a week.
We live with relatives, who do need us, but still, with me going to school instead of working all the time, we couldn't afford to live elsewhere. We pay part of the utilities here and help keep up the farm. My MIL is widowed and in bad health herself, she has terminal lung cancer. We live with her and probably will until she passes away.
You may say, "Not my problem, too bad." But every time someone like me looses a home, can't pay their payments, can't find work, can't get off food stamps or Medicaid because we can't make enough money, can't get educated for a better or different job, can't pay for our health care so we can stay healthy enough to go to work, to school, YOU ALL PAY FOR IT. You, the taxpayers.
One option is to just let people like me and others just swing in the wind. Well, we saw that during the great depression. Homeless people drifting around, no jobs, starving, stealing, living in camps, riding the rails.
The 22% unemployed during the Great Depression actually constitute about the same number people as the 10% we have now unemployed. The population of the US in the thirties was only about 127 million, it's now over 300 million. We've pretty much doubled our population since then. (our last big population increase was the early 90s, by the way...it's been decreasing since, probably in part because of economic reasons.) That's a lot of people not working and depending to some extent on social welfare to get by. But, what you gonna do? Just let them starve?
I've seen countries like that, been there, where over a third of the population is dirt floor shack poor. There's disease, filth everywhere, hunger, people selling their children for sex and farming them out to work hard labor for pennies, crime, theft, violence, children and old people eating from the garbage bins of the weathly.
Don't think we don't have places like that in Good Old America, too. I've seen it here too, along the Mississippi in small, very poor, mostly rural towns.
Yeah...not nice to think about, but without some of those awful "socialistic" programs we put in place in the 30s...that's what much more of America would be now...I'm convinced of it.