For the second day in a row, thousands of people lined up for free dental, medical and vision services in South Los Angeles courtesy of a nonprofit group that provides mobile health care for the rural poor.
Remote Area Medical set up for eight days of care at the Forum in L.A. The enormous response to the free care was a stark contrast to recent videos of Glenn Beck-watching Tea Baggers screaming at town hall meetings in opposition to proposed health insurance reform.
Geico, Lawyers.com, Procter & Gamble, Progressive Insurance and SC Johnson all pulled their ads from Glenn Beck’s Fox show this week after he called President Obama a “racist” during a July 28th broadcast. True Capitalism at its finest. Teabag that for while, Beck.
I had a little scare today. Last night I was feeling a little run down after work. I had trouble sleeping but when I finally did fall asleep I woke up and couldn’t breathe. This wasn’t the first time, after my bout with bronchitis earlier this year the doc at the walk-in clinic told me I might have asthma and he referred me to a specialist.
Problem is, I don’t have health insurance.
So what do you do when you wake up and can’t breathe? I headed to the emergency room, with a quick side trip to the ATM to get out some cash. I pulled out $600, my daily max.
There are 4000 asthma-related deaths every year in the United States, many of them uninsured (or under-insured) children. Asthma is the most common chronic disease among children. Asthma is treatable, but the most common treatment (inhaled corticosteroids) costs over $100 per month, which is way beyond what many families can afford.
4000 preventable deaths a year…more than all the people who died on September 11th. EVERY YEAR.
Except they aren’t being killed by foreign terrorists, it’s something much more sinister. Our own failed health care system is just letting them die.
This is why I support health insurance reform. Not because I think it’s going fix everything that’s wrong, but we have to do something. Because I know that there’s not always an extra $600 in my account. What if the bill was $4000? or $40,000? Is that when I just become another death statistic?
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, right?
It’s getting increasingly difficult for me to have any respect for anyone who doesn’t support universal health care for all. We are the richest country in the history of the world, and yet we do not take care of our own sick citizens.
The United States is the only developed nation that does not have a comprehensive national health care plan for all its citizens.
Who are these people that hate health care? Why do they hate America so much? Why do they want to continue in a system that gives financial incentives to KEEP PEOPLE SICK?
Sarah Palin said (in a Facebook posting) that Obama’s proposed health plan “is evil” and would create a “death panel” that would deny care to the neediest Americans. She’s like a character out of a Oliver Stone movie.
Rush Limbagh recently said the proposed health care logo was similar to a Nazi symbol. Nice one, you bloated pill popping prick.
The web site “Tea Party Patriots” circulated instructions to anti-health fanatics to attend Obama Town hall meetings and “Yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early. Get him off his prepared script and agenda,” the memo continued. “Stand up and shout and sit right back down.”
The sad part is that Fox is reporting all of this like it is news. If you watch Fox regularly as a source for your news, you need to get your head checked out.
But then again, I don’t think any health insurance plan covers ignorance.
Some gems from a brilliant post by Bill Maher in the Huffington Post:
“This country is like a college chick after two Long Island Iced Teas: we can be talked into anything.”
“Here’s one fun fact you can take away: did you know only about half of Americans are aware that Judaism is an older religion than Christianity? That’s right, half of America looks at books called the Old Testament and the New Testament and cannot figure out which one came first.
“James Madison wrote that “pure democracy” doesn’t work because “there is nothing to check… an obnoxious individual.” Then, in the margins, he doodled a picture of Joe the Plumber.
“A smart guy named Chesterton once said: “My country, right or wrong is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying… It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’ To which most Americans would respond: “Are you calling my mother a drunk?”
Deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C, libertarian think tank.
Two Japanese men are caught getting on a train into Switzerland. In their possession: United States Bonds in the amount of $134 billion dollars.
Initial reports were that they were agents of the Japanese finance ministry, making a surreptitious journey into Switzerland to sell off one small chunk of the massive mountain of US bonds stacked up in the Japanese Treasury vaults.
How on earth did these two men come to be there? And what does this say about the security and value of currency?
Critics of Obama’s tax and bailout plans are now “Going Galt”. What does this mean? Apparently it doesn’t involve inventing perpetual motion.
“I do some consulting on the side and the taxation on that income is unbelievable,”wrote one reader to Michelle Malkin. “So, to heck with this. I’m ‘going Galt’ on my consulting.” “I’m considering moving to a small family farm in a foreign country,”
Saturday, August 15
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