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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (1937)	9/1/2007 9:36:20 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Unless we arrive at definition of "poor" then the discussion can't go any further. I'm talking about "poor" the way the US government does. That's the default, I think. The government has set income thresholds. Some poor are the homeless; some are working poor. Most of them would qualify for some kind of assistance and not one of them earns enough for wage garnishment to be productive. If you define "poor" as people who potentially can pay for significant medical care, you've distorted the notion of poverty. And if you go back to my original statement I said sometimes. So your contention is that the uninsured NEVER pay their emergency room bills? I never assume never. But the number of poor paying more than a token amount of their ER bills is too small to warrant consideration from a systems perspective. Individual incidences, of course, would be personal tragedies, but you don't set public policy around them. There are other issues surrounding health care and the poor but subsidizing the insured ain't one of them. If you want to talk about the struggling middle class, the donut hole between the poor, who are supported to a large extent already by the health care system, and those who don't qualify for poverty programs yet have no insurance, that's another discussion.