skews13
Diamond Member
- Mar 18, 2017
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Welcome to America’s sickest reality show — where families turn to crowdfunding for cancer treatments while billionaires hoard obscene wealth. In no other developed nation do sick children depend on charity to survive, but here, it’s just another episode of our rigged system.
Regular readers might have noticed that our monthly Zoom meeting has been moved back to March 15; it’s because Louise and I were with our family from Michigan on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.
Yesterday afternoon (our last day), the ship was running a program where they were selling T-shirts to benefit St. Jude’s Hospital, a fine charity that’s doing great work. Weirdly, though, America is the only country in the world where children with cancer have to depend on the charity of others for research and treatment.
Somehow, this doesn’t seem abnormal to Americans. In fact, we are marinated in constant reminders — that we ignore because they have just come to see normal — of how unique America is in this regard.
Consider the ubiquitous ad for the company that buys life insurance policies. The senior citizen in the ad says something to the effect of, “We learned that we could sell our policy when a friend did so to pay their medical bills.”
Wait a minute: we live in the richest country in the world, with the richest billionaires in the world, and we have people who must sell their life insurance policies — depriving their middle-class kids of an inheritance — because somebody got sick?
That sure isn’t happening in most European countries, Canada, Costa Rica, Japan, Taiwan, or South Korea.
While every year over a half-million American families are wiped out so badly by medical debt that they must file for bankruptcy and often become homeless, the number of sickness-caused bankruptcies in all those countries combined is zero.
Another ad is for a company that sells “reverse mortgages” that let people strip equity out of their homes to cover living and medical expenses. Tom Sellick is a nice guy and all, but are there really that many seniors who are now destitute and thus must wipe out their largest store of wealth just to retire? And how much worse will this get as Elon Musk guts the Social Security administration?
Then there’s the ad for the Shriner’s hospital for children. One of the kids in the ad says to the camera that she was able to walk “because of people like you!” Here in American we must resort to crowdfunding medical care for children with deformities and birth defects? What the hell?
Why aren’t we all funding cancer cures and help for disabled for kids with our tax dollars? With, at the very least, the tax dollars of America’s billionaires?
Oh, yeah, that’s right: billionaires in America pretty much don’t pay income taxes any more, and haven’t since Reagan.
Regular readers might have noticed that our monthly Zoom meeting has been moved back to March 15; it’s because Louise and I were with our family from Michigan on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.
Yesterday afternoon (our last day), the ship was running a program where they were selling T-shirts to benefit St. Jude’s Hospital, a fine charity that’s doing great work. Weirdly, though, America is the only country in the world where children with cancer have to depend on the charity of others for research and treatment.
Somehow, this doesn’t seem abnormal to Americans. In fact, we are marinated in constant reminders — that we ignore because they have just come to see normal — of how unique America is in this regard.
Consider the ubiquitous ad for the company that buys life insurance policies. The senior citizen in the ad says something to the effect of, “We learned that we could sell our policy when a friend did so to pay their medical bills.”
Wait a minute: we live in the richest country in the world, with the richest billionaires in the world, and we have people who must sell their life insurance policies — depriving their middle-class kids of an inheritance — because somebody got sick?
That sure isn’t happening in most European countries, Canada, Costa Rica, Japan, Taiwan, or South Korea.
While every year over a half-million American families are wiped out so badly by medical debt that they must file for bankruptcy and often become homeless, the number of sickness-caused bankruptcies in all those countries combined is zero.
Another ad is for a company that sells “reverse mortgages” that let people strip equity out of their homes to cover living and medical expenses. Tom Sellick is a nice guy and all, but are there really that many seniors who are now destitute and thus must wipe out their largest store of wealth just to retire? And how much worse will this get as Elon Musk guts the Social Security administration?
Then there’s the ad for the Shriner’s hospital for children. One of the kids in the ad says to the camera that she was able to walk “because of people like you!” Here in American we must resort to crowdfunding medical care for children with deformities and birth defects? What the hell?
Why aren’t we all funding cancer cures and help for disabled for kids with our tax dollars? With, at the very least, the tax dollars of America’s billionaires?
Oh, yeah, that’s right: billionaires in America pretty much don’t pay income taxes any more, and haven’t since Reagan.
America’s Sickest Reality Show: Crowdfunding Cancer Care While Billionaires Hoard Billions
Welcome to America’s sickest reality show — where families turn to crowdfunding for cancer treatments while billionaires hoard obscene wealth. In no other developed nation do sick children depend on charity to survive, but here, it’s just another...
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