Ammo Grrrll only supplies two exclamation points to the title of this column, but you might want to add a third: MILLIONS WILL DIE IN THE STREETS!! She writes:
Oh Dear, not again! And I was just recovering from the prospect of having to just TELL our grandchildren about snow which will have disappeared from the earth as MILLIONS roast to death every day. MILLIONS!! To which I say, “Oh shut up. I live in Arizona. How much hotter could it get? Where’s the dang Ice Age we were promised on Earth Day in 1970?”
How well I remember the high-level arguments for the badly named “Affordable Care Act,” which mostly consisted of various celebrities and Democrat drones yelling “Free Health Care is A RIGHT!” and “Tens of millions of people will die if this 3000 page bill goes down to defeat.” And then for some reason, they always added, “they will die — in the streets!” Yes! That is the best place for sick people to be right before they die – in the streets. Plural. It’s a well-known fact.
Why, even in the Middle Ages when Black Death or Bubonic Plague devastated Europe (1346-1353), there were wagons roaming the empty streets every morning crying “Bring out your dead!” Evidently even semi-literate European peasants knew it was best just to die in bed.
But “dying in the streets” sounds so much more dramatic, so the Drama Queens of all 57 sexes decided to go with that.
Healthcare is ludicrously expensive for too many reasons to go into here. But it wasn’t always as bad. When I was a kid, Dr. Rinehardt came with his dreaded black bag full of penicillin shots, right to our house! I have no idea what that cost, but Daddy paid it out of his own pocket. He had only something he called “Major Medical” that meant our health needs had to reach a certain threshold before it kicked in and he took his lumps and paid for the rest. You know, like a responsible husband and parent.
When Joe and I married and had a young child, we also purchased Major Medical with a whopping $5,000 a year deductible. (When I was in the Typographical Union, we were eligible to go to Group Health for healthcare, but we never cancelled our Major Medical.) I believe at some point, we paid $300/month for it, which was over half what we paid for our mortgage. And – praise God! – we never once were able to reach the point where the insurance kicked in! Which meant we weren’t very sick or injured — which is a good thing.
One year I had to have my first colonoscopy, a treat in itself, of course, but just as fun was spending $1500 on it. Out of pocket. I think I actually had to ask them to let me make three payments, which I did.
But that $300 monthly outlay to Blue Cross meant we couldn’t take fancy vacations or buy a boat or 20 tattoos or $250 Air Jordans or a $2,000 designer purse or smoke cigarettes or use drugs or spend $10 a day at Starbucks or do any of the countless stupid things that Americans fritter away money on and then claim that they “can’t afford” to buy health insurance. That’s somebody else’s problem.
When the putative 40 million “uninsured” were examined closely, it turned out that a great many people even making $75,000 a year, back when that was a nice salary, simply did not CHOOSE to spend money on such a pedestrian and unfun thing as health insurance. Hey, if a kid had a motorcycle accident, the irresponsible parents could always clog up the ER or ICU where nobody could be turned away even uninsured.
In 2008, my “elderly” parents (roughly the same age as I am now) wintered in the same condo complex as we did in Palm Springs. We made dozens of wonderful memories. But somewhere in February a terrible flu swept through the whole state of California. Daddy got it bad, became dehydrated and disoriented and Mother and I spent 14 utterly miserable hours in the ER trying to get him seen when there had to be 100 illegals in the waiting room. Not even one insured.
Of course, SOMEBODY paid those bills. Taxpayers of California, thank you for your service.
When William Jefferson Clinton tried to trim the welfare rolls in the early ’90s, we were informed that MILLIONS of single mothers and their MILLIONS of children were going to die – again, in the streets. Not only did that not happen, of course, but a significant portion of these women got OFF welfare and were able to get jobs. In fact – prepare to be shocked – many of those women already HAD jobs for which they were paid in unreported cash! PLUS the Welfare! Nice work if you can get it! Clinton tried; but the pushback was fierce.
When abortion law was kicked back to the states and some states decided that killing a full-term baby was a bridge too far (not Minnesota, of course), all the right feminists and actresses and singers who had bragged about their multiple abortions assured us troglodytes that MILLIONS OF WOMEN WERE GOING TO DIE! Not “in the streets,” as it happened, but in “back alleys,” as a nice change of venue.
This was strange because I haven’t even SEEN a “back alley” since I was a kid. But, again, life went on and the only thing the baby-hating ghouls could point to was one woman who died from the abortion pill after missing her abortion doctor’s appointment in a different state because she hadn’t left soon enough to account for traffic.
And now – praise the Lord! – MOST of the ground has been cut out from under the fraud, waste and abuse that constituted 99 percent of USAID. And the shrieking from the same celebrities, and grifters who profited hugely from USAID has once again reached a fever pitch.
TENS OF MILLIONS WILL DIE by 2045 screamed one Internet headline I saw. Well, yes, and there’s some chance that quite a few of us reading this will be among them. Because people die. That’s what we do. We try not to think of it. We try to live every day with joy and hope and mostly Denial with a capital “D.”
I will be but a sprightly 99 then, so you never know. But it won’t be because we ended or amended the practice of funding left-wing NGOs under the pretext of giving aid to the “needy” in the form of transgender puppet shows.
It will probably be because I was driving to my 80th high school reunion, going the wrong way on Highway 17 and my last words will be – as so many of my words have been – “You’re all going the wrong way!!”
