Spending All Your Money On R&B Ringtones
by digby
I guess this kind of talk is back in vogue since it doesn’t even garner a comment from the NY Times:
“We as Republicans need to realize that you can’t just cut off the welfare queen and balance the budget,” says Rand Paul, a Senate candidate in Kentucky, who has some extreme views on other issues but is evidently pro-arithmetic
You know what that’s all about:
Welfare Queen mythology consists of massive exaggerations of welfare fraud that resonate with those in the anti-welfare movement. This mythology is rife with overt negative racial and class stereotypes where Welfare Queens are portrayed as lazy leeches on society, pilfering vast sums of money from “hard working people’s taxes.”
You don’t hear it much these days, but I suppose if you’re a guy who’s still smarting over the passage of the Civil Rights Act, it probably still feels pretty relevant:
And anyway, Dr Paul is way behind the times. The modern designation is “Health Care queen”:
During my last night’s shift in the ER, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient with a shiny new gold tooth, multiple elaborate tattoos, a very expensive brand of tennis shoes and a new cellular telephone equipped with her favorite R&B tune for a ringtone. Glancing over the chart, one could not help noticing her payer status: Medicaid. She smokes more than one costly pack of cigarettes every day and, somehow, still has money to buy beer.
And our Congress expects me to pay for this woman’s health care? Our nation’s health care crisis is not a shortage of quality hospitals, doctors or nurses. It is a crisis of culture — a culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on vices while refusing to take care of one’s self or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance. A culture that thinks “I can do whatever I want to because someone else will always take care of me”.
I dunno. I think if we could just stop paying for health care for people who waste it on stuff like “R&B ringtones” we’d have plenty of money to balance the budget, don’t you?
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