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It's About Time Astronauts Got Healthcare For Life (mashable.com)
Miriam Kramer, reporting for Mashable: NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria flew to space four times for the space agency between 1995 and 2007. While in space, his eyesight deteriorated, a well-documented medical issue NASA's known about for years, and one that many astronauts have experienced first-hand. For many astronauts, their eyesight readjusts once they get back to Earth. That wasn't the case for Lopez-Alegria, though. His eyesight got significantly worse during his time in orbit, and NASA isn't paying for his contacts or doctor visits today, years after his retirement from the agency. However, he still travels to Houston, Texas once per year to allow the agency to gather data about his health, without any expectation that NASA will offer treatment for any conditions that may have developed because of his time in space. In other words, while Lopez-Alegria's eyesight deteriorates, NASA benefits from the data he provides to the American space program, without medical recompense to him today. The lack of health care for former astronauts has long been a sore spot at NASA, but now it threatens the agency's future. Deep space missions beyond the moon, like a mission to Mars, require a better understanding of how extended spaceflight affects the human body.
Note that the jet hours requirement in that document is from 2004 and applied to Commanders and Pilots only, not Mission Specialists.
The market solution is to give you a $10 off coupon on healthcare for your service in Houston.
As Paul Ryan explained, if you want cheap healthcare you should have made better life decisions, like becoming a congressman rather than an astronaut.
Both parties murder people all around the world, but republicans are consistently the ones who want to spend more to do it -- even under Obama they were calling for bigger military spending increases than Obama wanted, and now that they have control they're pushing huge new military spending. Likewise, both parties like having the world's highest incarceration rate but republicans consistently try to spend more on militarizing the police and building more prisons and privatizing prisons to add more expensive corruption and perverse incentives.
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