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Man Robs Bank of $1 To Get Health Care In Jail
f1vlad writes "A 59-year-old man has been jailed in Gastonia, N.C., on charges of larceny after allegedly robbing an RBC Bank for $1 so he could get health care in prison. Richard James Verone handed a female teller a note demanding the money and claiming that he had a gun, according to the police report."
If you can't get a job, that's about the quickest, easiest way to get healthcare in the U.S. The healthcare isn't great in jails and prisons, but it beats the hell out of nothing.
For those of you fortunate enough to live in developed countries, let me break down the U.S. system for you. Here are the only ways to get healthcare in the U.S.:
1) Go to prison or jail. Not the best care, but beats nothing
2) Be real poor. This will usually qualify you for Medicaid--which sucks, but is also better than nothing.
3) Be a child. There are usually programs for providing healthcare for kids.
4) Be over 65. This will qualify you for Medicare--which isn't the best by a longshot (many doctors won't accept it) but it's a lot better than Medicaid
5) Get a job with benefits. This means a full-time job (working as a cashier at Walmart won't cut it). Better come armed with a college degree. Quality is all over the map.
6) Join the military. Very good healthcare. But this could involve getting shot at.
7) Become a Congressman of other high-ranking government official. Best fucking care you can get. Expect gold-plated bedpans for yourself and your family, even as you rail against government-supported healthcare for everyone else.
Of course, you can also elect to pay for it yourself. But, if you have ever seen what even basic healthcare costs in the U.S., you will realize this is impractical for anyone who isn't Bill Gates. A single emergency room visit could easily bankrupt even a moderately well-off individual. And don't even THINK about having surgery unless you've got a mansion to mortgage.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That's the way to do it when you've got nothing. How awful must his life have been to think that prison is a step up.
I love the NHS.
When I saw this story appear in my feed, I thought it was an article from The Onion. My god...
It never ceases to surprise me just how OK Americans are with rape, so long as the person being raped isn't a woman. Perhaps before we start lecturing other nations about human rights abuses, we might want to remember that there is a prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, and only the most narrow minded of people would consider prison conditions to not be a part of the punishment.
Then I have some really bad news for you.
You're ALREADY paying for all those people you are so don't like. Yes, it's true, you pay in form of taxes which cover ER visits that never get paid by poor people (who are often also unhealthy, go figure); you pay in the form of higher insurance premiums so that health care can be profitable (and because the pool of people is much smaller); you pay in the form of your business having less healthy employees; you pay in the form of a more dangerous society, as more people get pushed into crime because they cannot afford to care for themselves even working full time.
The jokes is really on you, because if you'd give up your ideological hatred for those people and for the idea that some social problems can be best tackled collectively through strategic actions by government, you'd end up paying less in taxes to cover Universal Healthcare than you currently pay for private insurance and all the unseen costs of having the terrible system we have today in the US.
I understand your frustration, but you're advocating a position that actually ends up being counter productive to your stated goals.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Because the US is (at least in theory) a civilized country, meaning that the person with lung cancer is going to be covered every time he goes to the ER anyway, as hospitals cannot refuse to give life-saving care. You're almost certainly paying more for the emergency care as they die than you would to give them the care they need to live.
If you are in fact arguing that hospitals should refuse life-saving care on the basis of a lack of insurance, you're a horrible human being.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
nope. Americans are suckered by propaganda; its all about emotions and not about facts and results. Just like global warming, for too many citizens its about their personal identity as a conservative or whatever and they can't be what they want/believe they are (and what is best) if they hold opposition positions-- its like the issues were made part of the definition of what they are... and they have been and it has been done under their nose--- instead of having them define their group they wish to belong to they define themselves to fit within the group. Ironic they are also such individualists...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
These are sops; ex-cons are flat-out unemployable. Heck, even if you're *not* a con it's tough to find a job for most people. But if you are... you're done. You're never, ever going to re-integrate with society unless you have resources of your own that make getting a job unnecessary.
The US is in the active process of creating a permanently unemployable underclass, consumed by rage and resentment, with a constantly increasing pool of criminal skills. The next "war" will be against this self-inflicted injury to society, and you can bet your last red cent it will consume the tattered rags of liberty remaining to non-felons today... felons are just a little ahead of the curve.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Are you [bad word] kidding me? In the process of creating a permanently unemployable underclass? As in present progressive tense? No, you should use the past tense. Try "have created" instead.
The conservatives and libertarians threw much of our rights under the bus in order to elect "tough on crime" candidates. Not only did this undermine our constitutional rights and create a giant prison industry that rivals the military industrial complex (why didn't anyone hold their feet to the fire for massively expanding government while campaigning as the "small government" crowd?), but creating a permanently unemployable underclass was the whole [bad word] point.
Conservative/libertarian economic philosophy has been undermining the middle class since the days of Reagan. One of the ways conservatives and libertarians have been able to mask this fact was by transferring large numbers of the working poor into prison, thus reducing job-seeking competition for people falling from the middle class into the upper reaches of the working poor. Without this part of the strategy, those riots you see in Wisconsin, Michigan and other places would have started happening a long time ago.