“Today’s decision by House appropriators to cut $1.3 billion in funding to Community Health Centers levels a devastating blow to Americans who are already struggling in the economic recession. If this cut were to be approved, it will mean that America’s Health Centers will lose the capacity to serve 11 million patients over the next year, with well over 3.3 million current patients losing their care within the next few months.”
I happen to know a Doctor who runs one of the larger health centers on the east coast. She's been at it for a long time. I cut to the chase and asked if this means people would die:
Will people die unnecessarily? You better believe it.
All programs are at risk. You think folks are pissed off now, if these cuts go as written, it’ll be a disaster. It’s going to be a very ugly couple of years.
Well there you have it. A credible voice says people will die as a result of belt tightening. The rubber just met the road.
I’m not smart enough to know what should be cut and what should stay. I do know that cutting a billion here or there on the 15% of the discretionary budget is not going to do a thing. These are rounding errors that are being played with.
The President’s budget is a joke. If we follow that path of trillion dollar deficits we won’t make it another five years without an explosion. A big one.
There is no way we can avoid that fate unless Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the military come on the table. The President didn’t even address this 85% of the budget. Like the Doctor said: It’s going to be a very ugly couple of years.
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John Stossel had some good ideas: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/02/02/i_can_balance_the_budget_108742.html
ReplyDeleteThe coverage of this travesty was even worse than usual. The first headline I saw on Yahoo Finance was "Obama budget curbs deficit" now amended to "Obama budget attacks deficit." What a complete load of gibberish!
ReplyDeleteThe Fed better promise its primary dealers a QE 3 or its going to get ugly--very soon.
WTF is a community health center? Answer...please where po folks go for free or massively discounted health care. Tell me again why anyone is entitled to free anything? This goes to the root of the discussion...health care has never been a right. You have to pay.
ReplyDeleteNot only health care, Fred.
ReplyDeleteWe all must pay for everything - food, energy, free time, lifestyle, education, housing - through our productivity or lack thereof. And now, with living standards declining, life is getting - for some precipitously, for others imperceptibly - nastier, more brutish and shorter.
We grew up in a period of rising living standards. Was the period 1948-1972 a one-time thing, a lie? A lie possible due to two-thirds of the world being kept out of the marketplace, or to cheap energy or to expanding real productivity?
This all makes me wonder if any workable social welfare scheme or indeed social cohesion itself is even possible: we live in a society in which investments chase investments, money is printed to make up for insufficient production and where real goods will soar in price for years to come...
“I happen to know a Doctor who runs one of the larger health centers on the east coast. She's been at it for a long time. I cut to the chase and asked if this means people would die.”
ReplyDeleteHmmmm…. So we are at a sweet spot where an extra dollar spent on top of last year budget would not have saved any lives?
Plenty of people trying to earn a living are dying unnecessarily, too. Dying unnecessarily is necessary to socialism. How else can a country afford the socialist lifestyle?.
ReplyDeleteRemember the tens of thousands of old folks in France who died of heat prostration one summer when it was unusually hot and their old age homes had no air conditioning? Is there a monument somewhere to these grandmeres and peres who went to their premature deaths in the loving care of the best of all possible health care systems?