It does seem like, as a society, we've abandoned our responsibility to support the whole, and are inventing reasons to justify a monstrous selfishness. While I've certainly known some chronically unemployed or under-employed individuals, who have plenty of opportunity but are just terrible employees, you can't make assumptions about entire groups of people and disregard the contributing problems within the system itself.
Exactly. The chapter I just read was discussing the time when a working class mother's child went missing. It turned out that the mother was hiding and drugging her child in an effort to pocket the money people offered as a reward. The media said that this women was an example of the working class! The entire working class was labelled as dysfunctional as this lone women. Ridiculous. As you say, yes there are a small amount of people who are lazy etc, but it's something that's blown way out of proportion by the media. For example, tax evasions is 60 times greater than benefit fraud. Do we hear much about that, though?
Nope. The current debate over the US healthcare bill is another example. When the CBO analysis revealed that the new bill proposes massive reductions in Medicaid, the reaction was, a collective shrug and remarks that those freeloaders can all go get jobs. As though all jobs provide health benefits - they don't, and many small business owners exploit every loophole available to avoid having to provide their low-skilled employees with a living wage or benefits, shifting the cost of providing benefits to the taxpayers. So who are the freeloaders? The employees or the small business owners? As though the disabled who are covered under Medicaid are just slackers. As though the elderly can get up out of their nursing home beds and get a job. As though the children of underemployed or absent parents should go get a job.
My own mother was bitching about Medicaid being an unnecessary public cost a few years ago, until I reminded her that my grandmother, who worked hard all her life, was dependent on Medicaid, because her retirement benefits didn't stretch to groceries and utilities and medications and doctors, too. At the end, it covered the cost of years in nursing home because chronic diabetes and multiple strokes left her with organic brain syndrome. I asked her if she thought her own mother was a freeloader and an unnecessary public expense to the taxpayers. If she herself was a freeloader because she put her own mother into a nursing home using medicaid benefits rather than assume all the expenses of her full time care.
Ha! How did your mother take that one? It seems to me that rather than engage the brain in the form of critical analysis people blindly accept what they're told. Not that I'm saying that's what your mother was doing. It's understandable when people are kept down by long working hours, living conditions etc.
I completely agree with what your saying. I'm disabled myself and soon to face a medical examination to determine if I'm deserving of benefits. We're fed lies that these tests, carried out by a private company might I add and not actual medical professionals, are somehow to make sure our needs are being met. As I'm sure you know they're a way to get as many people off benefits and back into work. It's creating so much unnessesary anxiety amoung people like myself. I disgressed a bit there but it ties in with the idea that a large amount in receipt of benefits are freeloaders.
I was talking to Char from here about the cuts to medicaid. She's understandably very worried about it as it helps pay for her mothers care. Is it just proposed at the minute or being implemented?
When I finished unloading on my mom, she just said, "oh". I don't think she even realized that it was Medicaid paying my grandmother's supplemental costs. I think she believed that Medicare paid for everything, which is "acceptable" because we all pay into Medicare during our working life, and receive benefits when we reach retirement age, so it seems more like regular insurance than like public assistance. She's never said anything since, other than to make one of her faces when another family member told us that she had to use Medicaid to cover the birth of her first baby, because her employer's insurance is so shitty.
I think it's genuinely ignorance (or misinformation if that sounds better) on the part of the vast majority of Americans, combined with prejudices so ingrained that they don't even know it's there. Yes, there's waste. Yes, there's fraud and abuse. Yes, there are people receiving benefits that don't need them. The system is full of loopholes and very short on oversight and enforcement. I know this - I work in healthcare. But instead of actually working to eliminate the waste, they just implement an across the board budget cut, and the lazy-thinking public assumes that it's going to be implemented by eliminating waste, rather than just cutting people off without regard to need or by reducing payments to providers.
The cuts are part of the Republican planned bill for replacing "obamacare". It hasn't passed yet. But I suspect it's only a matter of time.
My own mother was bitching about Medicaid being an unnecessary public cost a few years ago, until I reminded her that my grandmother, who worked hard all her life, was dependent on Medicaid, because her retirement benefits didn't stretch to groceries and utilities and medications and doctors, too. At the end, it covered the cost of years in nursing home because chronic diabetes and multiple strokes left her with organic brain syndrome. I asked her if she thought her own mother was a freeloader and an unnecessary public expense to the taxpayers. If she herself was a freeloader because she put her own mother into a nursing home using medicaid benefits rather than assume all the expenses of her full time care.
I completely agree with what your saying. I'm disabled myself and soon to face a medical examination to determine if I'm deserving of benefits. We're fed lies that these tests, carried out by a private company might I add and not actual medical professionals, are somehow to make sure our needs are being met. As I'm sure you know they're a way to get as many people off benefits and back into work. It's creating so much unnessesary anxiety amoung people like myself. I disgressed a bit there but it ties in with the idea that a large amount in receipt of benefits are freeloaders.
I was talking to Char from here about the cuts to medicaid. She's understandably very worried about it as it helps pay for her mothers care. Is it just proposed at the minute or being implemented?
I think it's genuinely ignorance (or misinformation if that sounds better) on the part of the vast majority of Americans, combined with prejudices so ingrained that they don't even know it's there. Yes, there's waste. Yes, there's fraud and abuse. Yes, there are people receiving benefits that don't need them. The system is full of loopholes and very short on oversight and enforcement. I know this - I work in healthcare. But instead of actually working to eliminate the waste, they just implement an across the board budget cut, and the lazy-thinking public assumes that it's going to be implemented by eliminating waste, rather than just cutting people off without regard to need or by reducing payments to providers.
The cuts are part of the Republican planned bill for replacing "obamacare". It hasn't passed yet. But I suspect it's only a matter of time.