well this post shows how little you know about America. All of the "people" you listed above would be taken care of. Nobody I know has a problem with footing the bill for those that CAN'T do it themselves. Unfortunately there are many who would rather lie and be lazy and steel the money that some other needy person would get.
it's all moot anyway because, and I'll say this slowly - ANYBODY IN AMERICA CAN GO INTO JUST ABOUT ANY HOSPITAL IN AMERICA AND GET MEDICAL CARE, ANYBODY. Now they may have a bill afterwards, but they don't have to pay it......
ok, how about this scenario. you and your wife both work, minimum wage, no benefits, one kid. you work hard, you pay your bills, but after childcare expenses you have no money left to pay for personal health insurance (if the cobra payments I had to pay are any indication, the premiums would be just about equal to a months take home pay at minimum wage, and when not in a group policy it's more)
now your kid gets sick, requiring long term medical care. now when it flares up really bad they do have to treat you (just to stabilize your condition, they don't have to heal you) at the ER.
so instead of missing a couple hours work to take your kid in to a $50 DR appointment (DR's and clinics are not required to treat you if you can't prove ability to pay), you get to miss a whole days work so you can wait around the ER, get treated by a DR who treats you like crap because you have no insurance, and then you get to owe several hundred for the ER visit.
since you have no way of getting regular care, you can't stabilize the kids condition, no health maintenance at all, so whenever the condition gets severe you do the ER thing again. you can't schedule these attacks so you can't ask ahead of time for time off to take the kid to the DR, just calls from the ER telling your boss that you are a no-show for work yet again (I wonder how long he'll put up with that?).
plus instead of the more affordable office visit where the DR is familiar with the patients condition, and understands whats normal for your kid and what has changed. you get the resident de' jour who spends as little time as possible with your kid (you are after all in the ER for a long-term illness, ER is for emergencies and besides he's got paying customers waiting), they don't have time to go through the whole case history and so they just do the bare minimum to stabilize the kid and send you out the door. maybe if your lucky he'll write a prescription you can't afford to fill.
and of course as the condition goes on without regular medical attention the attacks get worse and more frequent. so the costs goes up, more visits, more time off work, maybe you lose your job because you’re so damn unreliable.
2 episodes requiring minimum treatment at the ER will just about wipe out a months worth of minimum wage pay.
these are the people that get labeled dead beats and lazy. they are not at all uncommon. was a time in my life I was one of them(only it was the wife who was sick so I lost an income plus had to take care of the kid, still work my job, and pay for the treatment, but I had my family backing me up, loaning me money when needed, taking care of my son while I was at work.)
but a lot of these people have no safety net, no family to guarantee that you'll always have a roof and food if you need it. these people actually have more stability if they quit working and go on welfare.
it's wrong that we take care of people who do nothing, but let those who are willing to work fall through the cracks.
it's these people, the working poor(not those who can afford there own insurance or those who don't work, they have medical care), those are the ones we're talking about when we talk gov't health care.
so if we are already paying healthcare for those disabled or on welfare, plus we pay (through higher medical rates, or insurance premiums) for the ER visits when the working poor default on these bills (which is generally much more expensive than if we could provide them scheduled clinic visits), plus we pay all the medical bills, housing, & food costs to those who can't afford to work any more. how much is it costing us to go on the way we are?
