- No gatherings of more than 25 people which means the Nationwide MENSA for Trump convention is still on schedule with seats available.
- Funny how grocery store employees are often viewed as unskilled and undeserving of our respect (and wage justice) but now, along with medical professionals, are the very people we all count on the most to survive.
- What does toilet paper have to do with an upper respiratory infection pandemic?
- If this current crisis is not THE single proof that we must have universal health care, nationwide, funded by taxes and available to all at no additional cost, co-pay, or deductible, then they are right, we can’t fix “stupid”.
- On the same topic, if this crisis has not shown us that having a majority of families with young children and two parents working outside the home is a disaster waiting to happen, again, we can’t fight “stupid”.
- Haven’t we just proven that many of us can work from home?
- Will we not prove that many of the jobs we have are not really necessary?
- If we try to bail out Wall Street with billions, and it fails, why can’t we bail out the rest of us, just once, and see what happens?
Please share widely!
You had me with your first bullet!:)
Thanks, it came to me on the night it was announced by the state….I was wide awake at 2:00 in the morning and wrote it down before I fell asleep.
I’m not sleeping well either.
I’ve done all I can do for myself, my family, and my loved ones. I can’t do any more, and it is becoming increasingly apparent that it won’t be enough.
My wife has to sign up for health care. There are NO plans available that provide out-of-network coverage that we can even think about signing up for. The “affordable” plan that she’ll buy costs nearly $700/month. It has a $3,500 deductible and ridiculous co-pays. It has NO provisions for out-of-network providers. The insurance provider told my wife that if she is in an in-network hospital that has no in-network providers for basic things like radiology (one of the current ways that patients are ripped off), they will “negotiate” with us. The lowest cost for a plan that allows out-of-network providers is more than three times as much.
The current racket for hospitals is that they outsource all their expensive procedures — ultrasounds, CAT scans, MRIs, etc — to providers who are out-of-network. So the patient with a plan like the one we are being forced to buy has a modest injury (like my torn rotator-cuff a while ago) and gets hit with tens of thousands of dollars in surprise bills for routine procedures like ultrasounds.
I see everything I care about being destroyed and everyone I love being hurt. It is indeed hard to sleep at night.
I am reading “An American Sickness” by Elizabeth Rosenthal and she writes at length about what your wife is about to go through. It’s criminal. I can only read a few chapters at time as I get too angry and frustrated. We are nothing more than cash cows for wealthy investors involved with hedge fund buyouts of medical care providers.
Each time I heard Joe Biden at the debate defend the status quo and not support universal single payer (or whatever you want to call it), I wanted to scream.
I’ll bet that 90% of Americans are clueless about what is really going on and it is only when they get the bill that they realize that they have been conned.
I agree with each of your bullets.
Good points, with some real gems — particularly on grocery store employees and that last point on Wall Street. We shouldn’t be bailing out Wall Street… let the free market operate it’s magic, or you make the next financial crash inevitable. How many people said this in 2008? Absolutely everyone, left-right-center, knew this day would come.
We are only now figuring out how to bail out actual people…. and there are even some Democrats talking about means testing. A Republican friend of mine said he actually agrees with AOC on this point. Let’s just get the money out there to everyone and tax it later.
And I’ll add one for you: Our absurd shortage of basic medical equipment and supplies. Everything from surgical masks to ventilators. If we can figure out how to not run out of bombs (in some war no one needs) then surely we can respond to natural disasters better than this? Why do we have government, if not to prepare and protect society?
Trump’s response has been awful, but the blame doesn’t end there. Leadership in both parties has been totally lacking for many years now.
I don’t see why all the idle plants can’t be converted into mask and testing equipment factories. GM’s CEO already offered this, but the government is instead having states outbid each other for the few that are left inflating the price at a time when every state desperately needs more. Thank God my wife works in Partners, which has a steady supply and recently mandated all it’s employees get tested and wear masks. The public hospitals in NYC, Chicago, and Seattle are running out of masks. CA will soon be next. If Trump can abuse defense powers to build his idiotic wall (which did nothing to keep the virus out btw) he can certainly use the DPA to start building hospitals and making masks.
First thing Churchill did was centralize aircraft production under one government department led by an aircraft production czar who had extraordinary power to requisition private property and even factories and other government agencies to maximize Spitfire and Hurricane production and save England from the Hun. Our Hun is the virus and the masks and tests are our Hurricane and Spitfires. Time to get to work!