Wednesday, August 21, 2013

What happens when a liberal meets Medicaid head-on?


American Thinker has the answer.

Those of us in the healthcare field have seen up close what government programs like Medicaid mean in terms of a "right" to medical care.  Our emergency room happens to be in a major southern urban area.  If any one of the 20-somethings who voted for Obama would be willing to volunteer for at least a month at our facility, I can almost guarantee these same hoodwinked young people would be singing the praises of capitalism, warts and all.

Just ask Samantha (name changed to protect identity).  With so many college graduates looking for work, we recently hired the 24-year old at our registration desk.  Samantha is a die-hard liberal, but it just so happens her boyfriend is a 28-year-old conservative-minded accountant.  When first hired about three months ago, she talked a great deal about their political differences.

Samantha was very sympathetic to the plight of the poor and their need for assistance.  Moreover, she felt her boyfriend didn't understand the situation with this segment of the population which would be unable to survive without help from the government.

After one month of doing her job registering 45 ER Medicaid patients daily for various reasons like STD's, painkillers, child abuse, infected fingernails from having their nails done, old gunshot wounds, and pregnancy tests for as young as 12 years old, Samantha was visibly on the verge of a breakdown or a breakthrough, I couldn't tell which.

By the end of 90 days, Samantha told me what really affected her was the cold reality that most of the Medicaid patients treated her like dirt.

. . .

My father said there are two kinds of education -- the kind you get between the ears and the kind you get between a rock and a hard place.  Both are valuable.  Samantha's getting the second kind now.  Unfortunately, she says, the first kind didn't prepare her for this job, or the fact that she's helping to subsidize the kind of craziness she sees every day.  She says the DC politicians that have made her complicit in this madness sometimes make her angrier than the patients do.

Since she's open to real conversation, I'm trying to fill in the historical blanks for Samantha.  I tell her, for example, that when a progressive/Democrat/so-called liberal says the word "right" they are not talking about the kind of rights our founding fathers had in mind.  It's the pursuit of happiness we have a right to, not happiness.

All the free cell phones, subsidized housing, phony mortgage loans, education programs, ADC payments and trillion dollar healthcare plans have made most people more broke and miserable, not happier.  She now agrees.

There's more at the link.

I learned the same lessons working with prison inmates and their families.  The level of 'entitlement culture' was and is absolutely staggering, even after incarceration.  It's mind-boggling to hear a man convicted of multiple murders, rapes, assaults and other heinous crimes complaining bitterly that he's been 'disrespected' by a prison guard, or isn't 'getting his rights', and he's going to sue us for every cent we've got to make up for the suffering (physical, mental, spiritual and cultural) that these slights have caused him.

As an instructor at FLETC said to me one day, "In his first year the Correctional Officer can't do enough for the inmate.  In his second year, he can't do enough to the inmate.  In his third and subsequent years, he just doesn't give a damn any more."  Faced with this caliber of 'customer' - the same that the author of the above article encounters every day in his ER - can one blame him?

*Sigh*

Peter

4 comments:

Rolf said...

Yup. Pretty much. Know a few of those "we don't understand them, they need our help" liberals. Scary part is that some are STILL that way even after dealing with these problem folks for a while. I just have to shake my head and wonder.
Good read.

Toejam said...

Agree rolf,

There (sadly) does exist an unreformable Liberal who will never grasp the the notion that people who demand something for nothing are plain and simple social degenerates who are laughing at the starry-eyed Liberals and their stupidity.

And even more alarming the numbers of these parasites grow because their ilk are actually encouraged by the naive Liberal hand-holders to breed.

Stuart Garfath, Sydney Australia. said...

It's the same, and sometimes worse, here in Australia.
Example. In 1998, a Queensland butcher, Raymond Akhtar Ali, fathered a baby girl by his mistress, (he was married). Immediately after being born, he smashed her living body against hard surfaces, crushing her skull and breaking her ribs. He then chopped her in half at the abdomen, severed her right leg, and removed her genitalia, ('de-feminising her', as the Coroner said, then buried her body parts in the bush.
He was sentenced to 'life', (more about that). During the period, Sep 24, 2008 - Jan 22, 2009, he was fed a vegetarian diet as Halal food, (meat), was not available in the prison he was temporarily transferred to, and held in.
He successfully sued the Queensland Government, and has been awarded $3000 damages!. As for his 'life' sentence?, he is eligible to apply for parole next August, 2014!.
Do the Liberal Left even think, or wonder, that we despair of such events?, I think not.

TOTWTYTR said...

My liberal, soon to be a social worker daughter, is about to learn this lesson. Her first year of internship was in a suburban school system with 5 & 6 year old kids.

In a few weeks she's going to start working with battered and abused teen aged kids in an urban setting.

I hope the reality check isn't too much for her.