Received via email. Doctor signed email but I am not sure he wants his name released, so I have withheld it:
Dear Mr. President:
During my shift in the Emergency Room last night, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient whose smile revealed an expensive shiny gold tooth, whose body was adorned with a wide assortment of elaborate and costly tattoos, who wore a very expensive brand of tennis shoes and who chatted on a new cellular telephone equipped with a popular musical ringtone.
While glancing over her patient chart, I happened to notice that her payer status was listed as “Medicaid”! During my examination of her, the patient informed me that she smokes more than one costly pack of cigarettes every day and somehow still has money to buy pretzels and beer.
And, you and our Congress expect me to pay for this woman’s health care? I contend that our nation’s “health care crisis” is not the result of a shortage of quality hospitals, doctors or nurses. Rather, it is the result of a “crisis of culture”, a culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on luxuries and vices while refusing to take care of one’s self or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance.
It is a culture based in the irresponsible credo that “I can do whatever I want to because someone else will always take care of me”.
Once you fix this “culture crisis” that rewards irresponsibility and dependency, you’ll be amazed at how quickly our nation’s health care difficulties will disappear.
Respectfully,
I know of three people in the last month that turned down jobs because the wages aren’t better than their unemployment. Businesses in our are are short workers because they can not compete with unemployment and additional benefits: Heat program, food stamps, housing, chip. For those who have cash side jobs, along with the above mentioned benefits these people live a pretty nice lifestyle. Our government is encouraging this and it will only get worse.
This is pretty much the way the welfare state behaves everywhere. I got the same feeling the other day as I learned that a full 25% of the unemployed in my country are unemployed because they are lazy bums who spent their (mandatory, government funded) high school periods sleeping in the class room.
I, who didn’t, have to pay so they don’t need to work shitty jobs. I am sure there is a sewage system somewhere that needs cleaning for $10 per hour, but apparently it is evil of me to think that they have to take the logical consequences of their own decision to be lazy bums.
I tell you, if this sh*t gets bad enough, regular working people are going to revolt against the welfare payments to lazy, spoiled people by throwing them in the closest river. It seems that in modern society, it will sooner or later become a hallmark of intelligence, if you are wise enough to hate the (volountarily) poor.
Despicable.
Hans,
Most people will take the path of least resistance. If you make goodies available to them and they are high enough (in their minds), then why work? The damage has been done to the non-workers and to the system. Most of the public don’t understand because much of this has not been paid by them in the form of taxes. That is why the welfare state is still standing. Now we are at the point where borrowing is near an end, yet spending has not decreased. The system either defaults or the people must be taxed to support it. Neither solution will work.
Instead of being angry at the so-called beneficiaries, I am angry at the politicians who ruined so many lives by leading these people to believe it was acceptable to live at the expense of others.
Well, I guess I have plenty of anger to go around. While I will agree that the politicians carry the foremost blame, the intellectual sloppiness of someone not understanding that his money has to come from somewhere offends me. And the people I’m discussing here are the “perpetual welfare cases”, not the people who are fooled to believe that they actually pay in about as much as they get out.
Hans,
We have no disagreement. Perhaps I was trying to make too fine a point and not doing it well. If the government said it was proper to steal and actually encouraged it, lazy, less intelligent people would see that as a means to the good life (so would some clever, educated people such as Madoff). Once the government condones certain behavior, you will get more of it. The amount you get will be a function of how much you are rewarded.