Neighbors

by digby

You may have already seen this, but it’s so depressing that it needs to be documented again. Senator Tom Coburn, a doctor, tells one of his constituents whose disabled husband was discharged from a nursing home and told “you’re on your own,” that the answer to her problem is that people need to help out their neighbors. Seriously.

Americans refuse to pay an extra penny in taxes to make sure that they and their neighbors don’t go broke and wind up without any support if they get sick. But we are supposed to rely on our neighbors to come in and change our bedpans for us.

These are the answers these crackpots have for people in desperate shape: if you are 62 and work for a small company that doesn’t provide insurance, you need to quit and find a large one that provides it. And when you get sick and inevitably go broke, you should go out and beg your neighbors to take care of you.

Whatever you do, don’t ask the government to solve the problem. Once you do that, the next thing you know they’ll be taking over Medicare and regulating the food supply. And then where would we be?

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