Oh God, I started a thing.
Well, here's my thought on the whole thing as one of those "Lazy poor people" that don't have a job. (Not saying that any of you guys think that, but thats what I hear on the tv all the time any more. I don't have a job = being a lazy F**k.
)
My family is dirt poor, yea? All three adults are jobless and my brother is still too young for a job. My Dad is handicapped & Diabetic the state helps pay for his things, but we still have to pay $25 a month for all of his meds and around $50 for his Diabetic supplies and other such things.
Right now we live in low-income housing thats cheap because we are living off my father's disability check. That pays the bills and little else. I pay for food when I can (I paint and sell those when I can), other than that we don't have a reliable source of money for food. If I do poorly one month we go without food for a few days or have to eat bread & butter for a few weeks.
I want a job, my mom wants a job, however there's nothing available for us that's anything more than minimum wage around here. The kicker is that because our housing is income based, our rent
will go up $500 PER JOB. That works out to use both needing 3 part time jobs each to make enough to feed our family after rent, however there is a cap to how much you can make to live the (low income) housing and we would exceed that with that many jobs. So we'd be homeless again. on top of that I go to uni more than full time. Most days I'm there from the crack of dawn to dusk, if not later. I don't have time for a job as I have one that doesn't pay me anything and puts me farther in the hole money wise.
I only have partial Health care through my Uni which only pays for accidents that happen on campus and life threatening things that happen within campus grounds. That's it.
If some ass-hat runs me down on the other side of town they might as well bring the morgue van because I don't have the money for the ambulance. There's also a 25% up front, co-pay that we can't afford. We can't even afford the co-pay.
If one of us gets sick or hurt, well tuff poop. We can't even afford the doctor visit fee for the "Low income" places. I can't get my Anti-depressant pills, I know I have Diabetics but can't pay for the test to get a disability payment to help pay for it. My mom has a non-cancerous tumor that needs to come out and my brother's teeth are a mess...and there's nothing we can do about it. Nothing.
I'm NOT saying free health care will fix all our problems, but It would give me a little bit of peace to know I won't die in my sleep for "x" reason that I already knew was a problem.
That's where I come from.