Q: What do you call someone in their 20s or 30s who has cancer?
A: A Canadian
...at least in the USA, since a U.S. citizen with cancer in their 20s will be broke, then homeless, then often dead soon after they get to stage 4. Contrasting view points here, and here, regarding cancer and hilarity.
Yeah, and from the admirers or liberty and it's pursuit above all else (aka Fox news devotees), not all cancers are from life choices - healthy athletes who eat excellent diets get colon cancer sometimes too, healthy non-smokers can get lung cancer, a series of bad sunburns as a very small child can lead to early onset skin cancer in one's 20s - or from someones genetic make up. Those poor bastards who get such terminal illnesses, well, in America, too bad for them. It's not the Fox News devotee's problem. Everyone else should stop their whining, and get some boot straps! You might make Fox viewers begin to develop a sense of morality, or a conscience that considers something outside their own myopic microcosm.
9 years ago
You must have heard the same NPR show I heard. It was interesting that the 20-something dual-citizenship Czech woman with colon cancer said it was cheaper for her to fly to Prague to get treatment than to get it in the US even though she has typical US insurance as well as Czech-provided healthcare.
ReplyDeleteYep, NPR was the prompt for that thread in my head. That radio story, combined with the fact that one of the libertarian readers of this blog had Hodgkins Lymphoma that nearly killed him when he had no insurance. He and his Fox News Devotee spouse continue to promulgate the concept that the only and best way to pay for such severe illnesses, are through charity help - volunteer doctors & donations taken up from work. Sure, that's FINE if you work for a large national bank with wealthy employees and you are popular among your co-workers. It's great that the defender of liberty did not go bankrupt from his massive illness, BUT THAT IS AN EXCEPTION to the rule, it's not the rule in America. Luck played a huge role in his being alive, not liberty, or the free market. He'd be alive if he was in Europe or Japan too, and he would not have had to have taken up a collection at work to pay for it.
ReplyDeleteIf my son were to get the same disease, and he did not have insurance, Trac & I would go bankrupt in trying to pay for the medical care of our 22 year old son. It's one of the considerations as to why we are subsidizing his health insurance now, for catastrophic illnesses. Christopher is a popular and charismatic young man, but his college aged friends have no funds, and his blue collar extended families no longer have any substantial retirement savings stashed away, or non-underwater home equities which to leverage.
But hey, why not consider the entire future through the lens of the 90s or early Bush years, when most all Americans were floating in a sea of highly leveraged liquidity, and then extrapolate it out to apply universally to everyone in a massive over-generalization? And then, in addition, refuse to listen to other sides of the issue and mock your sane logical friends as "fanciful"?
Fanciful? No. Pragmatic, realistic, moral, ethical, not-massively-selfish, not myopic, yes.
Yeah, I don't hide my disdain very well. It's why I don't win when I play poker.
But...but...but...won't the free market eventually cure cancer if we take the guv'mint's dirty hands off of it? I mean, once the megacorporations who market cancer therapy are free from the onerous burden of a 1% effective corporate tax rate, won't they throw all their resources into cusring cancer so nobody has to buy their drug cocktails anymore?
ReplyDelete